​WHOOSH! Is Good at Cleaning Screens, Reminding Me of My Failures

A few months ago,  I grew a bunch of gross stuff on my cell phone, took pictures of the mild biohazard that popped up, and wrote a story about it. Soon after, I got a bottle of Whoosh! Super Natural Clean Screen Shine screen cleaner in the mail.

Since then, back in July sometime, I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Whoosh! Super Natural Clean Screen Shine screen cleaner. I had never in my life thought about a screen cleaner before, and frankly I don't ever want to think about one again.

Soon after I wrote about gross phones in what was already a self-indulgent exercise undertaken simply because it was fun as hell, I got an email from a public relations person for Whoosh (sorry, WHOOSH!). As far as PR pitches go, it was on point: My name was spelled right. My article was referenced. It was short, it was personal: "It'd make for a great follow-up on your previous article. The outcome of your experiment was pretty disgusting!" I was told.

In the back of my head I thought, yeah, maybe this could be a good thing to try out. I asked if the company had any way of proving it killed bacteria and viruses as was promised. I was told that, yes, it did, and the CEO could talk to me about it.

My Whoosh(!) arrived a few days later. It's an attractive product, it came with this sweet orange cloth.  It's sold by Apple. As far as screen cleaners go, I assume it's a good product. It has very good reviews on Amazon. I sprayed my phone, and my laptop screen, and my desk, and all sorts of other nonsense I had laying around. The smudges were gone. The screen looked clean.

Cool.

What, I thought to myself, is the story here? That this screen cleaner cleans screens? That's not interesting for anyone outside of maybe a few diehard gadget review sites that love fawning over stuff like this.

The PR person asked if I got the Whoosh. I said that I did in fact get it, and that it is "cool."

"Am thinking of some way to write about it in an interesting way because we don't do straight product reviews," I said.

The company offered to send me its in-house bacteria testing device so that I could add some science to any potential story. Now we're getting somewhere, I thought. I would borrow the detector, swab a bunch of stuff, clean it, then swab it again. That at least is kind of cool, and, really, I just wanted to play with a microbe detector.

The  SystemSure Plus Luminometer arrived a few days later. It works by measuring the adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, of any given sample. ATP is made by mitochondria in every living cell; the SystemSure Plus Luminometer detects ATP and if you have some, then there's stuff living there. It does this by measuring "Relative Light Units," which, very basically, is a measure of the light given off by ATP in certain reactions that happen within the sample.

I swabbed my phone. I got an RLU reading of 13.  There's not really a scale for RLU other than high=bad, for purposes of contamination. I Whooshed the fuck out of my phone. Tried again. I got an RLU of 2. Well done, Whoosh.

Fundamentally, any prospective story I would do hadn't changed. "Whoosh does what it says it's supposed to do" is not a compelling story, and it's still vastly out of touch with the rest of our coverage.

Maybe I could explore where and why ATP luminometers are used? The answer turned out to be not so compelling: They're used in restaurants by like, safety inspectors, and in hospitals by people who want to make sure hospitals aren't dirty.

Maybe I could swab doorknobs and subway rails and the floor and the inside of my mouth or something? It's been done, by third graders, for a long time. Who cares. As someone who is not particularly germophobic, this didn't seem all that compelling to me, either.

I mailed the bacteria tester back. I paid like $30 to do it. Whoosh costs $9. In the meantime, I wrote dozens and dozens of stories about lots of things. Breaking news and think pieces and wacky stories. Whoosh(!) fell by the wayside.

There was no story here, not for us, at least. Still, in the beginning, I had spent time interviewing the CEO. I had accepted the bacteria tester, which the company says it needs to show off at trade shows and that sort of thing. In theory, I owe the company nothing, so why did I feel like I had to find some way to salvage this story?

I start and stop stories all the time and don't write them for any number of reasons: Someone else does it first or better; the news hook is past its prime; it just turns out to not be all that interesting; I go on vacation; I feel sick or dip out of work early to catch a baseball game; something else more important comes up. I make choices about what stories to write all the time, every day. That is the essence of this job.

The difference here, I guess, is that, well, it's this PR person's job to get me to write about it. The "sorry to be a pest" but when the fuck is your story running emails started coming. I could tell the PR person to buzz off and my life would be no different.

But, well, I put a lot of time into trying to write about this, for whatever reason. I get hundreds of pitches a week; it's usually immediately clear if something is worth writing about or not.

Here, it wasn't. I suspected that a story about a screen cleaner would probably be dumb, but the bacteria tester was alluring.

Last night, I was talking to my friend about how the (polite, biweekly-ish) emails from the PR person were really getting me down; each one a reminder that I hadn't found anything to write about and a reminder that I was probably going to have to say, eventually, that I can't in good conscious write about a screen cleaner, even if it is a good screen cleaner.

Whoosh, I will say, appears to be a good screen cleaner. I hope I never write another word about a screen cleaner.