My friends and I used to think the whole wristband fad was lame. We’d see people with three or four colored wristbands on their arms and thought they looked like walking billboards for causes that they probably had no real interest in. It was like the lazy man’s method of making a statement that didn’t even warrant a t-shirt or clever bumper sticker. A wristband can be discarded when the issue is no longer in vogue. Whales not endangered anymore? My blue wristband is going into the trash.
So we decided one day to get make our own custom silicone bracelet. We figured we could make up some outrageous cause, start the trend, and maybe even pocket a few dollars of profit when people hopped on the bandwagon. So we called up a local company that specializes in wristband and told them our idea for a custom silicone bracelet: all black with yellow stars going around it. Our “cause” was pretty obscure — launch all of our nuclear waste into space instead of stockpiling it under mountains here on Earth.
We thought we had a good plan because most people think rocketing thousands of tons of nuclear waste over the entirety of the world is a pretty bad idea; our custom silicone bracelet essentially advocated endangering the whole planet. But the more word spread about our space-waste custom silicone bracelet, the more people started buying them. So much so that we ran out of our initial order. People are dumb.
