I, Justine: An Analog Memoir

by Justine Ezarik

  “Do you know anyone who does video editing?” he asked.

  “Actually, I’m a video editor . . . although, we don’t work with video very much around here,” I said, gesturing around the small shop.

  He sort of rocked back on his heels and smirked. “Well, I’m hiring,” he said. “If you come work for me, I’ll double your salary.”

  I swear my eyes must have popped right out of my head. Double my salary?! I don’t care if this guy is out of his mind, I am so out of here, I thought.

  A week or so later, I went in for an interview, during which the man from the copy shop asked if I knew how to use an Avid. An Avid is a professional-grade video-editing system, the kind the pros use in feature film and television production. I had no idea how they worked.

  “Absolutely,” I lied. (I assumed—incorrectly, it turns out—that teaching myself to use an Avid would be no problem.)

  So, I got that job, too. Which is how I came to work for a very, very shady chiropractor.

  Dr. Rolex (not his real name) was the inventor of a device called the Back-o-Matic (not the product’s real name, either). Supposedly, this amazing machine could gently realign a patient’s spine by, uh, “tapping” the vertebrae back into place (thereby eliminating the need for all that awkward joint-popping and neck-cracking chiropractors are known for). Though he did treat the occasional patient, the bulk of Dr. Rolex’s business was based on selling Back-o-Matics to chiropractors across the country. For the low, low price of one hundred thousand dollars, Dr. Rolex would sell you a Back-o-Matic, teach you how to use it, film you using it, and send you home with a package of pre-edited commercials you could air in your own hometown via public access television. My job was to edit those commercials. At least, that was the scope of my job on the day I was hired.

  It became clear rather quickly that Dr. Rolex was a pretty weird dude. For one thing, I was expected to be in the office for sixty to eighty hours a week, though there wasn’t nearly enough work to fill those hours—it didn’t take me very long to splice the commercials together, after all, and only so many visiting doctors showed up in the office each week. Still, Dr. Rolex was obsessed with making his employees account for their whereabouts virtually every second of every day via wildly detailed time sheets. After being subjected to a fair amount of harassment for failing to turn in my time sheets, or for being too vague about my day-to-day activities, I started keeping ridiculously meticulous notes: At 1:42, I ate a turkey sandwich. At 3:07, I peed.

  Before long, I started getting tasked with an array of odd side projects. One day, Dr. Rolex asked me to take some photographs of him to be used as head shots. Then he stood over my desk and barked out instructions on the proper way to Photoshop his hair. (He had a receding hairline, which he was clearly self-conscious about.) The next, he told me he was thinking about selling his house, so I was made to drive out to his home, photograph it, and put together a brochure for his real estate agent. He spent a lot of time talking about what a superior businessman he was, how everyone in his employ was lucky to work for him, how this was basically the best job any of us would ever have. He was bossy and egotistical. He was abusive and inappropriate. If you think I’m exaggerating, there is now a private Facebook support group for former employees. As time went on, it became apparent that Dr. Rolex wasn’t just weird—he was crazy.

  I was miserable. So, like the true friend I am, I brought Dez into this hellhole with me. I got her a job there, too.

  There must have been fifty people working on the ground floor of the office complex, including Dr. Rolex, supported by a team of chiropractors, nurses, and assistants, but we worked in the basement. It was just me and Dez, AJ—a part-time video editor with his own production company, who eventually taught me how to use the Avid—and Darin, who was hired by Dr. Rolex more or less to babysit Dez and me. (I should point out that AJ and Darin were both wonderful, talented, and not at all crazy.)

  Most days, I zipped through my editing work and then screwed around for the rest of the afternoon, counting down the seconds until it was finally time to go home. I surfed the web aimlessly. I checked my Myspace friend count obsessively. I juggled office supplies. Dez would hide the stylus from my Palm Treo around the office—that was usually good for another five minutes of distraction. We came up with more and more ridiculous things to write on our stupid time sheets.

  Once, not long after some new office cabinetry was installed, I decided to see if I could fit inside one of the drawers. I squeezed myself inside and Dez slowly eased the drawer shut. I was still giggling when I heard the door to our office fly open.

  “Good morning, team!” Dr. Rolex bellowed.

  I immediately started sweating—both because it was really hot inside that tiny drawer and because I absolutely hate confrontation; this was not something I wanted to have to explain. Excuses started flying through my head. I decided that if Dez and Darin couldn’t stifle their laughter—something neither of them was particularly good at doing, anyway—I’d just say that I was seeing if I could fit inside the drawer in order to properly assess how many DVDs we’d be able to store for future processing. Yeah, perfect, I thought. That’s exactly what I’ll say. Brilliant!

  I could barely hear Dr. Rolex ask what Dez and Darin were laughing at over the sound of my rapidly beating heart. Luckily, my coworkers were able to keep it together long enough to avoid ratting me out. I lived to work another day. And that was part of the problem: even with my best friend there with me—even with the distraction of our crazy antics—our jobs sucked. We were unmotivated. We were creatively stifled. We were depressed. Most of all, we were bored. Dez and I needed something to do. . . .

  THE OATMEAL FACE, AND OTHER HEARTBREAKING WORKS OF STAGGERING GENIUS

  ONE OF THE FIRST VIDEOS I ever uploaded to YouTube was of me microwaving and eating a bowl of instant oatmeal. Dez and I had our morning routine in those days: we’d arrive at the office early, usually before anyone else had come in; I’d check my email and various social media accounts; we’d compare schedules, see what videos we might have to shoot or edit that day; and then we’d hang out in the office kitchenette, chatting over Quaker Instant Oatmeal, which we ate out of Styrofoam bowls with plastic spoons. We did this pretty much every day, almost without exception. Until one day, I decided to make a video about it.

  I was still running Daily Random Photo back then, so I was pretty comfortable posting stupid snapshots of myself online (to say nothing of those glorious promotional photos I took as “the iPod girl”). I had uploaded one or two short videos to Myspace, too—I have vague memories of doing a kind of Irish Riverdance, barefoot, in the stockroom at Business Partners. Once, not long after nearly getting caught hiding in a drawer, Dez and I spent the better part of an afternoon playing hide-and-seek inside and underneath the office furniture; I made a ten-second clip of myself climbing out of a cabinet, set to the theme from Mission: Impossible. Making a video about oatmeal, then, didn’t seem all that weird, or even all that out of the ordinary. Besides, we were mind-numbingly, achingly bored. I would’ve done just about anything to entertain myself.

  So, I placed the camera, along with an unopened packet of oatmeal, in a cabinet; I filmed myself opening the cabinet and grabbing the oatmeal. I repeated the process, but this time I put a plastic bird in the cabinet, too (which begs the question, why did we have a plastic bird just lying around the office?). I put the oatmeal in the microwave and aggressively poked all the buttons, feigning confusion, as if I didn’t quite grasp how a microwave worked. I put the oatmeal inside a desk drawer; each time I opened the drawer I’d make a silly or crazy or just really weird face.

  I pretended to maniacally stab the oatmeal with my spoon as if reenacting the shower scene from Psycho. Finally, I ate the oatmeal, staring straight into the camera virtually the entire time. I spliced together the clips on the Avid. I added a song. I posted it online. It was as simple, and as silly, as that.

  Let’s take some questions, shall we?
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  Nope. As I think I’ve made pretty clear by now, days at the chiropractor’s office were long and Dez and I were bored. I get questions like this all the time, though, which just goes to show you that “bored” and “high on psychedelic drugs” must look pretty similar on camera. For the record, I have never done drugs. Ever.

  This question implies that I didn’t take my YouTube debut very seriously, and that would be correct. Then again, I didn’t have much in the way of “examples” to choose from—YouTube had been around for less than a year (longer if you count several months of beta testing); the whole notion of user-generated content was still pretty new. There was no such thing as a YouTube celebrity. Hardly anyone was vlogging yet. The concept of being Internet famous didn’t really exist. So, no, I didn’t put a lot of stock in what people would think of my first-ever YouTube video. Frankly, I’m still shocked that so many people (467,915 views and counting!) have even seen it.

  In fact, YouTube wasn’t even my first stop when uploading videos to the web in those days. I preferred Myspace, Yahoo, my personal blog (tastyblogsnack.com, at the time), and—most important—Revver, which was one of the first and only video-sharing sites that allowed content creators to earn a share of the ad-generated revenue. Granted, my first few checks were pretty paltry: we’re talking maybe two bucks. But the fact that I could earn money at all, just by posting silly videos I made with my best friend at work, was pretty awesome.

  I did microwave my spoon, though not on purpose. In fact, in the uncut version of the video, you can clearly hear Desirée say, “I hope you like spoon with your oatmeal.” I guess I was distracted?

  True, the black shrug over the blue tank top is, at best, a questionable fashion statement—I mean, it’s very 2006. Then again, I am wearing pants. And a long-sleeved shirt. And flat, closed-toe shoes. And I’m in an office. Eating instant oatmeal. Maybe that’s a pretty slutty thing to do, though? Who can say?

  Um, yes? How do you make oatmeal? With Evian?

  I followed “The Oatmeal Project” up with “The Oatmeal Face,” a forty-two-second video in which I pretended, zombie-eyed, to stir a phantom bowl of oatmeal, with my mouth open and my tongue hanging out. Near the end, I slid out of my blue office chair. It was set to “Lux Aeterna,” that really haunting song from Requiem for a Dream.

  Yes, you are correct, I do look creepy. For some reason, a lot of my early videos were pretty dark and disturbing. I once made a video, shot at night, in which Dez and I walked up and down the sidewalk outside of Crazy Mocha, our favorite coffee shop, wearing superhero face masks. We found an abandoned sofa on the street, which we proceeded to sit on; we slowly turned our heads in unison toward the camera, then slowly turned our heads away. It was practically Kubrickian in its strangeness. Also, sorry for scaring your cousin.

  Not long after posting the oatmeal videos, I asked Dez if she would hit me in the head with an apple. Why? I don’t know. Enough with the questions, already.

  We promo’d the video with a twenty-second teaser trailer, at the end of which I typed just one word: Soon. The full-length video features a lot of stalling on my part—“I’m trusting you!” I keep yelling at her, before crying out, “Just do it!!!”—spliced with shots of Dez menacingly tossing a Granny Smith in the air. Eventually, after a lot of prodding—and a lot of promises that, no, I would not be mad at her—Dez launched an apple at my head. I ran the throw in slo-mo.

  She hit me in the ear, by the way. It was great.

  Our next video—which, oddly, seems to be something of a fan favorite—was called “Have You Seen My Stylus?” As I mentioned earlier, I had a Palm Treo at the time, and I was constantly dropping, temporarily misplacing, or just out-and-out losing the stylus. Sometimes, Dez would find the stylus on the floor of the office and hide it from me for a while. One day I just turned to her and said, in a weird, crazy, creepy voice, “What did you do with my stylus?” At that point, filming a video about said stylus—in which I actually encouraged Dez to lick it—seemed like a pretty obvious next step.

  It didn’t take long to branch out and start filming videos outside the office in our off time. I was (and am) a huge fan of Mikey and Big Bob, two local DJs and the hosts of the Morning Freak Show on 96.1 KISS in Pittsburgh. They had a relatively large social media following, especially for the time. I remember feeling a little jealous that they had such fun, ridiculous jobs—these guys got paid a salary (with benefits, presumably) to be silly and stupid on the radio. I didn’t see any reason why Dez and I couldn’t do that. We were already doing that. We could be silly and stupid, too! And that was pretty much my inspiration for donning a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume and running around the yard behind our apartment (to the Ninja Turtles theme song, obviously). Here’s the craziest part of that whole video, though: you can clearly see my and Dez’s apartment in the background. I didn’t realize then how stupid—and how very unsafe—it was to make it so easy to track either one of us down via the Internet. It gives you an idea of just how naive I was. Imagine how surreal it was, though, to see that Mikey and Big Bob actually commented on that video on their Myspace page.

  It was the closest thing to stardom I’d ever encountered—not that Dez and I had stardom in mind. Our wildest dreams and ambitions were wrapped up in getting enough freelance work to quit our jobs at the chiropractor’s office and go into business for ourselves. If we could show people what we were capable of—not so much the hiding in cabinets and throwing apples at each other, but filming, editing, building websites, and establishing a social media presence—they might hire us. With that goal in mind, we started our own website, followed quickly by a late-night podcast, called Mommy Pack My Lunch (or MPML for short; the name was based largely on nostalgia for the days when our mothers still packed our lunches for school).

  It was, arguably, a strange idea: our podcasts were just as ridiculous as our videos. We envisioned MPML as some kind of pseudo–news station, but we weren’t reporting on anything of substance so much as staying up way too late and taking calls from our friends to discuss . . . nothing important, it turns out. For no real reason, we filmed a lot at our local Walmart. One night we drove over there to buy some Clairol hair color after deciding to dye Dez’s naturally blond hair brown (I played the role of Dez’s hairdresser in the video, for which I donned a weird, floor-length, floral old-lady dress, naturally). Soon after that, we went back so I could walk up and down the empty aisles, pretending to talk on my cell phone, before taking a huge (staged) face-plant (which I actually repeated several times so we could shoot it from multiple angles). We were less Woodward and Bernstein and more Laverne & Shirley. We signed up for another Myspace account. I drove traffic from my iJustine accounts to our MPML site. We peaked at a couple hundred listeners for each podcast—not too shabby at the time.

  The first Mommy Pack My Lunch publicity still . . . sooo professional.

  Here’s the thing, though: I knew, even then, that Dez wasn’t really into this whole upload-crazy-videos-of-ourselves-on-the-Internet thing; at least, not in the same way that I was. She didn’t want to be in the videos as much as I wanted her to be in the videos. I sometimes had to coach her (and by “coach” I mean pressure, prod, poke, and harass): Say this. Now, say it again, but in a different voice. Be weirder. Be funnier. Hold the stylus higher. Actually, hold it in your other hand. Now lick it. Yes, you look great. Do it again. Okay, do it one more time.

  That’s in no way a complaint or a criticism—Dez was not only my best friend, she was a great sport. But whereas I was increasingly serious about creating content and building a following online—registering domains right and left, signing up for more and more social media sites, taking more and more ridiculous photos, hatching more and more plans for silly videos we could make—she approached the project much more casually, as if it was just something fun we were doing together, as friends. Frankly, she didn’t care as much as I did. And I was starting to care a lot.

  I was spending hours and hours each we
ek scouring the web for new ways to connect with people, as well as listening to podcasts (partly for my own entertainment and partly as a means of comparison to what MPML was doing). Dez and I aired most of our podcasts via TalkShoe, but I also frequented Odeo—a kind of podcasting platform-meets-aggregator. When the guys at Odeo announced a new venture called Twitter, I didn’t just sign up; I more or less started live-tweeting my entire life. There weren’t many of us tweeting back then; in fact, I kept seeing the same people pop up on my feed—I just didn’t realize they were the creators of the site.

  I was also starting to film more and more videos on my own, without Dez. I headed back to Walmart for the launch of PlayStation 3 and made a four-minute video to summarize my thirty-plus-hour campout. Highlights include: spending the night in the Garden Center on a bed made from boxes of unassembled patio furniture; kicking a poor janitor out of the restroom around midnight so I could wash my face and brush my teeth in peace; and interviewing the ten people who managed to queue up in front me (I had no idea then that interviewing folks in line for major tech releases would become such a large part of my future).

  And when I found out that something called PodCamp was coming to town, I immediately signed myself up for that, too.

  PodCamp (my friends kept referring to it as “iPod Camp,” no doubt envisioning some kind of weekend-long summer camp for Apple nerds . . . which, actually, is not that far off . . . ) was a free, low-key tech conference for new-media enthusiasts. (The founders actually referred to it as an unconference to emphasize the informal, unorganized nature of the event.) Bloggers, podcasters, social networkers, and YouTubers—or anyone, really, who was remotely interested in the digital tech space—could sign up to learn new skills, network with one another, and hear talks from both amateurs and professionals working in the field. One of the professionals scheduled to speak that year was Alex Lindsay, a Pittsburgh native living in Silicon Valley.