Wrong Address
When Jane Brammer’s yearbook staff settled on a fictitious Web site name for the cover of Lake Region High School’s yearbook, she worried that it would be too plain.
A plain cover turned out to be the least of her worries. The yearbook staff at the school in Eagle Lake, Fla., wanted something to reflect today’s “dot-com era,” but it seems that while Ms. Brammer’s students were brainstorming for a technology-inspired yearbook cover, a French adult-products company was doing some brainstorming of its own.
They both came up with the same idea: The only problem for Lake Region High was that the company’s Web site was real.
It took only a day after the yearbooks were distributed late last month for word to get around the 1,900-student school that the yearbook title was actually a French adult Web site.
When a student told Ms. Brammer, she was shocked. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’” she said.
Although the yearbook staff had checked to see whether the address was in use last June, the school didn’t register the address. So the school didn’t know that a French company, Loisirs 2000, had taken the Web address last December.
The school received a number of phone calls from parents who wanted an explanation. Most parents were almost dying of laughter, according to Ms. Brammer.
“They understood that the incident was not intentional,” she said. “It’s just a sign of the times.”
With a new year under way, Ms. Brammer is trying to make the yearbook incident a distant memory. Still, she is hoping the exposure will help boost advertising sales for the 2001 yearbook.
This year marked the first time the yearbook actually sold out. Ms. Brammer would like to be able to reap such sales again—but she said it will be a long time before she agrees to use another World Wide Web address.
“My 15 minutes of fame have been a nightmare,” she said.
—Adrienne D. Coles
