For the second day in a row I was alarmed to see light planes circling low over the campus.
Yesterday, though, one was pulling a banner advertisement from an insurance company– never mind which one, but it rhymes with “Beico”.
This bothered me a bit, and it took me a while to figure out why.
You often hear that large companies search the likes of Facebook and YouTube for improprieties committed by potential employees.
“We’re not trying to morally censure the acts themselves,” they say, while an applicant’s grainy Spring Break video featuring an iguana, life-size cardboard cutouts of Britney Spears, Hillary Clinton, and John Glenn, six boxes of Lucky Charms, eyeliner, and a toaster oven rolls in the background, “but rather the person’s bad judgment in allowing the information to become public.”
Turns out that works both ways.
It’s all fun and games until a plane lands on the student union because the pilot was flying over the most densely populated part of the city with neither the airspeed nor altitude required to establish a useful margin for error.
Who would be motivated to buy insurance from a company that engages in such obviously risky behavior– while flying a giant banner bragging that it’s them doing it?