Planner Reads

Last Friday, I sent out this tweet about ExpenseASteak.com:

CFOs face flood of flawless faux receipts http://pic.gd/7ab1a9; ExpenseASteak.com vies for guerrilla site of 2009 http://bit.ly/IsLY3

Today’s AdAge article on ExpenseASteak.com by Bob Garfield reminded me of both the brilliance and limitations of Twitter. While Tweets are timely treats, they simply can’t deliver the whole meal. My tweet tried to call attention to both the ethical issues and the sublime cleverness of Expense A Steak.com and did neither very well. And since I don’t have a lot of time at the moment, I’m going to borrow a few of the highlights from Garfield’s review.

Just in case you haven’t visited the site for yourself, here’s how Garfield described it:

Go to expenseasteak.com and fill in the obscenely large amount of your Maloney & Porcelli meal. Out will come a PDF of receipts for exactly that amount — innocuous (and extremely realistic) proof of purchases for taxis, panini lunches, office supplies, business books and so on. Accounting doesn’t ask why you’ve bought $700 worth of anti-static floor mats and toner? That’s their problem

And here’s Garfield’s appraisal of the ...