A High Tech Version of The Dog Ate My Homework

The high-tech version of the dog-ate-my-homework is the corrupted file, which is now available for a small fee. A online retailer, corrupted-files.com, is offering corrupted files for sale, the theory being, that people like teachers—and technology magazine editors—who are expecting a manuscript on deadline, might not actually attempt to open that file until days later. And if they receive a corrupted file with the right title, they'll never know that it wasn't the real file to begin with, buying the writer days of procrastination. And then, of course, the writer might be able to bargain for a few more days to troubleshoot the problem.

At $3.95 a file, it makes a lot more business sense than pets.com ever did.

PS to Spectrum authors: don't try this at home.