Actress Elyse Porterfield is probably getting a lot of calls right about now, or at least we hope she is: For she is the real identity of “Jenny DryErase,” the ‘HOPA’ who “quit her job” via dry erase board and whipped the Internet (and a good number of mainstream outlets) into a froth in the process. Nice trollin’, TheCHIVE.
Boing Boing dug up the following casting call for a CHIVE photoshoot in early August, asking for a “girl next door model type”:
Meanwhile, the brothers behind the scheme, John and Leo Resig, confirmed that it was a product of their invention, dreamt up about a month ago:
The brothers Resig came up with the idea for “Dry Erase Girl” about a month ago at the King’s Head Bar in Santa Monica, CA, and wrote down the details on paper napkins, including the etymology of HOPA (see below). Says John Resig, “We came up with a hoax that was completely relatable. It wasn’t spread by TechCrunch and Reddit. It was spread by Facebook and inter-office email. Everyone wants to quit their jobs like this.“
They got a gift, then — and a hook — in the form of Steven Slater’s dramatic job exit just the day before.
A lot of media types got rather sanctimonious about the hoax before it was confirmed a hoax, saying the feeding frenzy surrounding it represented the Death of Journalism and all that. This is stupid. While it’s a little embarrassing for a publication like the New York Post to report on it straight up without even the slightest inkling that it just might not be real, which I think was actually expressed by most of the blogs covering it, and while the story became extremely oversaturated once it shot to the top of Reddit with 2000+ upvotes (see: How Reddit Controls the Internet News Cycle), it was a good lark, real or fake. As Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote on Twitter yesterday, “My money is on it being Fakesauce. But oh so entertaining.”
(TechCrunch via Adland. title image via BuzzFeed.)
