That Personal Touch

By Rick Horowitz

I know what you're thinking: "My life isn't complicated enough. What I need in my life is another machine."

Here comes one now -- or actually, here come several thousand of them, and once they start invading your neighborhood, life just won't be the same.

Or maybe you missed the news: CreataCard. The American Greetings Corporation brought CreataCard into the big wide world just the other day. It's a "computerized greeting card system" that lets You the Consumer come up with your very own personalized greeting cards.

You step up to the screen and choose the design you like and the exact sentiments you want to share. Add names and dates for that extra-personal touch, maybe even a bit of poetry you came up with yourself, a closing thought or two. Then push a button and zap! -- you've got a card. Three and a half minutes. Three and a half bucks. A bargain.

Used to be, you wanted to send somebody a card, you went down to the drugstore, or the grocery store, or even the card shop, and you wandered up and down the aisles until you found the category you wanted and card that did the trick, more or less:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

If you were a horse,

They'd have turned you to glue.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

It might not have been perfect, but it's the thought that counts, you told yourself. Then they started getting more specific, the card companies did, and started coming up with more and more categories: "To My Second Counsin on Her Third Anniversary." "To My Third Cousin on Her Second Divorce." And more and more sentiments:

I'm sending you this little card,

It's not a big production,

To wish you all the very best

In your latest liposuction.

That kind of thing. To the point where you figured they had about every kind of thought you'd ever want to put on a card already on a card. But no. Not quite. And besides, with personalized computerized cards, now you'll also be able to mix-and-match messages -- one from Column A, one from Column B:

You're having a birthday,

What's better than that?

So sorry to hear

You ran over your cat.

Plus, of course, there's the chance to reach that special someone with a card that's up-close and totally personal:

You're in my thoughts both night and day,

I hope you feel the same,

I want to spend my life with you,

My darling [ENTER NAME].

I guess it's OK. I guess letting folks decide just what they want to say in a card makes sense -- even if the reason cards became popular in the first place was that people couldn't decide what they wanted to say and were willing pay card companies to say it for them.

There's an alternative.

Hard to believe, but there's another system out there, too, one that's already been on the market for a while. The design choices may not be quite as exciting as what CreataCard is offering, but the words -- you can come up with things, personalized things, unique things the computer never dreamed of.

I think they call it: WriteaLetter.