Nerd nirvana.
Ripoffreport.com could be described in purely Internet terms. It could be described in terms of its fonts (herky-jerky), its content (rambling) or its essential reason for being (to be revealed later). But it might be best to start out with a metaphor.
Imagine a fat man. He is about 55. His white T-shirt, emblazoned with the name of a used car dealership, bulges with a colorful pastiche of tobacco stains and old traces of discount-brand mustard.
The man is standing on his lawn, brandishing something. It's a baseball bat. No, it's a rake. He's brandishing a rake, and he's yelling something across the street at a local lobster house. It's not entirely clear what he's saying, but three phrases are intelligible enough to poke through the thick slurry of alcohol and rage: "FOOD POISONING! RUN YOU OUT OF BUSINESS! COCKSUUUUUUUCKER!"
Across the street, a man pokes his head out from inside the restaurant. He wears a battered hairnet, and a quizzical expression. He's covered in brine. "ASSHOOOOOOLE!" he yells. "YOUR FAMILY IS A BUNCH OF DEGENERATE IRANIAN CRACK DEALERS!"
This is Ripoffreport.com.
The site, it must be noted, is nominally high-minded. It's supposed to be a place where consumers, unmoderated by sane people or any traditional sense of restraint, can post complaints about local businesses. In one of its coolest functions, you can search by category (including Airports, Probation Officers, Realtors and, interestingly, Abusive Children) or by location, meaning you can dig up the dirt on the place next door.
And the businesses slammed don't just have to sit there and take it; the companies (or their defenders) can hit back with posts of their own, meaning sometimes straight-forward remarks can quickly degenerate into a sea of rhetorical muck rich enough to feed a battalion of libel lawyers for a week.
The site's back and forth can be sweet and vicious like a good clean kickboxing match.
Take, for example, this jaw-droppingly trivial complaint about a non-delivered yogurt order:
Don't ever order from Angora cafe in Boston!!!!! My roommates and I ordered frozen yogurt from there last week, like we sometimes do. First of all, when my roommate called, the girl who answered the phone was pretty daft. She spoke english, so she couldn't use that as an excuse, but she kept screwing up the address that my roommate gave her. Whatever. Not a big deal,
right? She said it would be 45 minutes. We NEVER left our room so we couldn't have possibly missed their phone call.
TWO HOURS LATER... we called to see where the hell our stuff was and the girl answered the phone and repeated the WRONG address back to us and i said, "NO there isn't even a building with that number!!!!" and i repeated the address to her. She told me to hang on and she put some guy on who hardly spoke any english. He said the driver had tried to call up to us 3 times and he left a message on our machine because we weren't home. Needless to say I told him that we were here the whole time and he then complained. What a bunch of idiots!
One of the three abusive rebuttals sums up the opposing viewpoint fairly clearly:
Setting things straight
First of all, Angora is a a solid place to eat. Yogurt?...Delivery?...Come on people. Snap out it, and get out of the house. Angora is a a nice little place to get quality sandwiches and really good yogurt. This rip-off is very undeserving, so we have to set things straight here.
As for the rebuttal...Whoever you are, don't tell people they are "mentaly retarded" when you can't even spell the word right. It's all about credibility these days, and you have none at this point. "Mutter"???....Don't you mean "Utter"? I do know one thing - I'd put my money on the first moron in a spelling bee. Fools....
mike — boston, Massachusetts
Lessons:
1. Virtual anonymity is empowering.
2. Don't knock the locals.
3. Different people have different thresholds for what constitutes a "rip off."
This exchange rates, possibly, a 3 out of 10 by Ripoffreport.com standards. For the agenda setter, check out the gut-ripping, spine-crunching battle royale over a little place known as "The Tail of the Pup."
Ripoffreport's thousands of offerings make for hours of "found object fun." The titles of its stories are awkward, falling over themselves in their literal nature. One of its best seems to be titled "DO NOT JOIN 24 HOUR FITNESS OR 24 HOUR FITNESS SPORT CLUBS OR YOU COULD GET KILLED! *Consumer Suggestion *UPDATE Dean McAdams you are a racist! *Consumer Suggestion *REBUTTALS"
Contained within is a very personal story of loss and redemption thinly disguised as a consumer complaint. In a story as old as mankind, a guy walks into a bathhouse where "a perky Armenian girl approximately age 25 began flirting with me."
Then:
At 5:30 p.m. the flirtatious Armenian girl's father walked up to me out of the blue and committed assault and battery upon me by touching me with his finger, drawing it across my neck and saying "I am going to kill you!" in a thick Armenian accent.
The story then descends into an anti-Armenian racism strong enough to make an Ottoman emperor salute proudly. A free sample:
"My wife will not even join this club because of the known danger from
Armenians!"
This can't be faked. Nor can the fact that halfway through the interchange, the Armenian girl suddenly becomes known as "Perky."
But the site's clear reason for being is the epic prose poem known to aficionados as "Pizza Hut
Address:
495 W. Apache Trail
Apache Junction AZ
U.S.A."
This title, incidentally, is like calling the Old Testament:
"Religious Text
Address: Several towns and some desert
A while ago
The Middle East"
The story boggles the mind with its scope and complexity. Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace could not come up with "Pizza Hut's" plot twists and mind-bending, contemporary American depravity if they were trapped in an elevator together for a week.
It starts like this:
Sworn Affidavits and recorded testimony reveal that Crystal
Methamphetamine sales have been a continuing practice at the Pizza Hut in Apache Junction, Arizona.
And it gets so much better.
You get sexual depravity:
This is quite ironic, considering that Betty Carter, and
practically every Pizza Hut employee is well aware that both
of her Pizza Hut manager sons, Rick and Tim Carter, have had
sex with many 15 and 16 year old girls, and that sex with
minors has been a common practice in the Carter family for
many years.
Political corruption:
Betty also bragged to many of her employees that she has ties with the Apache Junction Police Department and has been quoted that she, Betty, "owns the whole town," due to her police connections.
and amazing, jaw dropping health code violations:
6.. Cockroaches were in pizza boxes, food and everywhere.
7... Pizza boxes would be kicked to knock out the roaches and the mice droppings before being used for a delivery.
8... One affidavit claims that a dead mouse was found in the
pizza dough and just picked out and that the dough was then still used to make pizzas.
9...Numerous testimonies reveal that two mice were killed when they were rolled through the dough roller.
If Ripoffreport.com was smart — and, granted, evidence to that effect is somewhat scarce — they'd option the movie rights to Sauce, a film directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy and, in a surprise return to the top of the box office, Paul Reubens.
In short: Grip the cornucopia of trash, Web surfers. Grip the horn and tip it toward your greedy mouth, drinking of the filth, corruption and frothy, unintentional comedy contained within. Ripoffreport.com is the Web's ultimate waste product: An intoxicating cocktail of wild accusations, anonymous counter-charges and the fetid stench of human weakness.
Check it out before vengeful legal action leaves a Ripoffreport.com-shaped hole in all of our hearts.
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
