Please excuse the Google preoccupation, this post should end it..

I’ve been yapping like a terrier over at GoogleGuy’s place about the Lauren Turner imbroglio. I think Matt Cutts is trying to tell me that he doesn’t just serve an audience of rabid webmasters but he is also necessarily sensitive to the community and culture inside Google, and that its not productive for Matt Cutts to pile on. He does point me to the official Google Response. I’ll quote the relevant portion here:

We blew it.

Unfortunately, they really are missing the larger point. No matter how much Adam Bosworth cares about healthcare, they don’t get to just circle the wagons around Lauren Turner and say “oh, hey, our bad, she’s new.” As I was saying over at mattcutts.com it’s not just process, its political but its not just that either, for me, and for my friends and for my family its personal. When Turner says Sicko unfairly takes “an isolated, heartbreaking, or sensationalist story to paint a picture of healthcare as a whole” she’s telling all the rest of us that pay big bucks for health care that is barely sufficient that we are the fringe, the outliers. Those that get their claims denied, that suffer from the seemingly routine practice of adverse billing errors are really just the extremes, sort of the exceptions that prove the rule. When my wife has to call the insurance company to get some forms for her doctor to fill out because the insurance company won’t pay for more than 7 days of a prescribed medication because its not on some magic list (speaking of that, how come my wife, presumably the sick one, has to play secretary for the other two parties who know each other, approve of each other, and understand whats going on? how come the two parties that are profiting from my wife’s illness cant do their own legwork?) I guess I’m just glad that my wife has her shit together enough to actually get that done. I don’t really like thinking about all the people who face the same obstacles ever day and don’t have their shit together, probably including me. And I get angry when I realize that Lauren Turner represents Google and considers my problems, small as they are in comparison to so many, some sort of statistical outlier that can be solved with a little “reputation management.” Fuck that noise. If she’s as new as they imply, then I’ve done a hell of a lot more for their bottom line over the years, and they ought to think of me or maybe just the millions out there like me as they decide how to handle this. Then maybe they’d come up with something better than “Whoa, sorry dude, we spaced”