Editor’s Note

A sense of humor is not lost on Bill Wilson, an insurance agent hailing from Tennessee. Wilson spent three days of his vacation time crafting www.LearnNothing.com, a spoof site the name of which pays tribute to one of his favorite sites, www.LearnSomething.com.

Wilson based the website on a real company’s site where he took a personal auto course in just 10 minutes using a multiple screen format that allowed him to answer test questions while viewing the course materials right beside it.

“In 10 minutes I’d passed the exam and, if I’d been willing to give them my credit card, I could have had 12 hours CE credit.” That’s how he came up with LearnNothing.com’s “blank page” technology, which saves agents time because they don’t have to read anything.

The press release touting Wilson’s make-believe CE world was distributed around the country via email. I passed over the email in my In Box at least three times figuring I’d go back to the press release later. I was surprised when I read what it contained. Its appearance was completely professional; its contents completely laughable.

“I did it just as a lark,” Wilson said. “I’m on several mailing lists and I receive these press releases all the time. It seems like half of them are about online CE courses and all of them are leaders in the industry.”

Wilson’s experience says several things to me. On one level I’m amazed that in three days he could churn out a professional looking site complete with sounds and links and all kinds of clever details.

On a more serious level, I wonder what would inspire—or uninspire—a person to the point where he or she believed it was worth the
while to purchase a domain name and spend vacation time poking fun at an online CE system that has been birthed in just this last year.

Exasperation manifests itself in many different ways. For some it turns into complacency. For others, it’s fodder for biting jokes. For Bill Wilson, it turned into a biting website.

I imagine that getting 12 hours of CE credit in 10 minutes for Wilson was a shocking occurrence. What’s the point? Insurance struggles to be considered a profession. Like stock brokers. And lawyers. Why dumb up the qualifications for keeping an insurance license?

It’s a slap in the face to the industry and the clients it serves. When considering these issues, I think it best to reflect on a passage from Wilson’s press release:

“Our alliance with LearnNothing and CEScam significantly opens up our markets to even more gullible agents and industry slackers,” said CECertificateMill CEO Justin Thyme. “In return, we provide both organizations with a proven track record of timely approvals of mindless drivel that we all jokingly call ‘continuing education.’ Now, with the voluminous content enabled by LearnNothing’s stable of typing monkeys and state-of-the-art ‘blank page’ technology, we can continue to successfully con legions of bean-counting insurance department bureaucrats into approving increasing numbers of worthless CE courses.”