John Kelso from Austin American Statesman talks BreakkUp!
Saltlick Lab’s BreakkUp.com project was featured in sunday’s Metro & State section of the Austin American Statesman. Go read it!
Dear John letters have gone digital
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Too chicken to call up your girlfriend (boyfriend) to tell her (him) to take a hike?If that’s your problem, try using BreakkUp.com, a new Web site started by Austinite Colin Anawaty, a self-professed "big Internet geek."
For $14.99 by e-mail, or $19.99 for a letter, Anawaty’s service will let your suddenly insignificant other know the party’s over, or at least that it needs a new set of balloons, so to speak.
The letter comes in a black envelope, written on ruby red paper, and is sealed with a wax stamp — sounds almost as evil as getting something from the IRS.
"It’s like receiving a Tiffany’s box with a ring in it to tell them when you love them," said Anawaty, 27. But what do you say when you’ve got problems? "That’s when the black envelope with the seal on it comes into play."
Anawaty says he got the idea for his Web site after he heard his live-in girlfriend’s friends crabbing about their boyfriends. Thanks, guys, for watching too much football and not taking out the trash. Look at the trouble you’ve started.
If you ask me, and you didn’t, if you’ve got somebody you’re trying to ditch, you ought to have the guts to do it yourself and not hire it out. God knows when a variety of women wanted me to get lost, and they didn’t need somebody else to tell me to go self-mate. Is the Internet breeding a generation of cowards? If you don’t have the guts to break up face to face, you shouldn’t be wearing pants.
"Uh, sure, and you know sometimes in a really abusive relationship you might want to keep your distance," Anawaty explained. "And that face to face might be a bad thing." If it’s that bad, call the police.
In Anawaty’s favor, he points out the letters aren’t necessarily of the "go to hell" variety. The sender gets to dictate the tone of the message. "We offer them the ability to say, ‘I don’t ever want to talk to you again,’ but we offer the option of saying, ‘We need to sit down and talk,’" he said.
Perhaps the best part of the Web site is that it lets you post the details of your sorry relationship online so people can vote on whether you should jump ship. Stories posted are listed under such headlines as "He Likes Prostitutes," which rarely plays well with most women I’ve known.
Better still, people get to vote on whether the folks who have shared their personal dramas should "Break Up!" or "Chill Out." "If you get more than fifteen ‘Break Up!’ votes, it’s probably time to move on," the press release says.
The people posting these stories have no shame.
Take the 19-year-old Londoner who is jumped upon at 17 by his 28-year-old female boss. Sounded like a good deal to me, but I’d like to see a photo before voting up or down. But that was before I heard the female boss’s husband was part of the package.
Now I’m thinking the kid should move to another town and join a monastery.
John Kelso’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Contact him at 445-3606 or jkelso@statesman.com
Source: http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/12/14/1214kelso.html
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