Eyjafjallajökull Apartments for Rent!

April 19th, 2010 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Smoking Issues and Apartments | No Comments »

My coworkers think that it’d be just a great idea to write about last week’s volcanic explosion in Iceland…and how it relates to apartments. Sounds like a wager to me.

I’ve been out of the office for a week and initially thought, perhaps as a result of the medicinal relationship I’ve developed with Robitussin ‘lo these past few days, that I was watching one of those awesome National Geographic specials on natural disasters . It wasn’t until I was questioning the selection of Jim Lehrer as a dramatic narrator that I realized I was actually just watching the News.

So why would it be a good idea to try and connect the apartment rental market with this huge natural disaster in the middle of the North Atlantic? Google, baby, Google. Adopting the Jay Leno model for content can end up driving a lot of traffic, like we experienced for our series on The Hills last year. The only problem with this is that no one knows how to spell the damn thing. Thus, no one will really be typing in ‘Eyjafjallajökull,’ into the Google, much less ‘Eyjafjallajökull apartments for rent.’ It is a sure bet, however, bids on domains that start with E and use a lot of J’s, K’s and F’s have begun to increase over the past week.
(Actually I just thought of a possibility. Lava lamps will be coming back in style, so how about the headline ‘Unpronounceable Mountain Explosion Drives Retro Interior Design Trend beyond the College Dorm’? Someone owes me a beer.)

Also, this is a huge natural disaster, but it really hasn’t been a horrible tragedy yet. So far, the biggest upshots of this enormous geological event have been cool pictures and people stranded in airports. So unless you have a satellite or are starting the International Complainers ‘I’ve had it up to here!’ Competition, the marketing opportunities are a bit scant at first glance.

So, those are the cons, I suppose. In the spirit of adhering to a strict dialectic, (which we’ve done only once before and for the penultimate issue of naked apartment dwellers) it would seem necessary to come up with some pros.

Alright, let’s see so there are all these people stuck in airports and they can’t get home. It is not as if the Red Cross or Doctors without Borders are assembling and being dispatched to major Airports on either to provide nourishment and hope to people who’s vacation just got extended.

With all this in mind, I’d make a pretty confident bet that the beleaguered hospitality industry considers the falling ash more like manna, however. It seems too laborious to collect evidence at the moment, so let’s just assume that those rich hotel magnates, you know the ones, those fat cats with monocles and silly, old fashioned, but fun to say in a high pitched tone of voice names are just making a killing on people who need a place for their families to stay for a few days because they are stuck in the same clothes the same clothes they were wearing for a week and playing the 506th round of 20 questions with their kids.

And so that’s how we’ll tie this all back to apartments for rent. If you are at SFO, and can’t get into a hotel, and are nearly broke trying to live on overpriced 10 dollar avocado sandwiches from Amoura Café, your kids have run off and banded together with other kids and built a fort in the parking garage, your eyeballs are screaming and your breath just melted your own ice cream cone because you can’t even change your contacts or brush your teeth since they only allow you to have a 3 oz bottles, then just leave a comment below and you can come stay at my apartment until this whole mess is over. They have Wifi at the airport, right? Unless some power hungry gang of bellicose Europeans have banded together to monopolize the power outlets in all the terminals. If you have done this, you may not stay at my apartment.