ihatefiling.com

I file things. Things like bills, receipts, and such. I need to put these files in something, and since I ran out of something to put files in, I bought some new file folders. They were $3.99.

Glancing over at the box earlier tonight, I noticed that the Esselte Corporation (owners of the Pendaflex brand) have stamped a website onto their boxes of file folders: ihatefiling.com. ihatefiling.com doesn't go directly to the I Hate Filing Club, but if you've got fingers and a mouse, you can probably find it.

So...this club seems to have been around since the middle of last year and has significantly less comment traffic than /dev/null, which doesn't make me as happy as I expect it to.

When I think about ihatefiling.com, I get the impression that at some point early last year, the President or CEO or whatever of Pendaflex noticed some sort of web-based product tie-in for the first time and thought to himself, "wow, we really need one of those!" and immediately held a meeting with his subordinates to get cracking and assemble a glorious web presense for the Esselte corporation—but, mind you, not anything too stuffy. "This would be on the internet, and the internet is hip! We want hip people to buy our paper products, so don't make the website too stuffy," he'd say. "You could call it something ironic like ihatefiling.com," and thus, the concept was born.

I think a similar line of reasoning was responsible for things like the Slurpee web site, which invites you to—get this—answer Slurpee trivia questions.