AirBnB's first TV ad: You are a paper plane

It's hard being a paper plane.

Life can be short and brutal.

You're often blown off course. People can dismiss you as trivial. You're easily crushed.

In fact, some hotels treat people the same way -- and charge them a fortune for the privilege.

So along comes AirBnB with a TV ad that turns the life of a paper plane into a drama of quite epic scale and scope.

Well, at least that's how I see it. AllThingsD tells me that it was created by asking those who waft to far-off parts, stay in strange people's houses, and don't wreck them to create Vines based on specific tweets.

These were quite esoteric.

Sample: "A paper airplane falls straight down onto a sidewalk. 2 seconds later a hand carries the plane away."

Another sample: "A paper plane lands in Vladimir Putin's eye. He declares it must have come from Chechnya."

Wait, that last one may have been my invention.

The completed four-and-a-half-minute oeuvre ran on the Sundance Channel on Thursday night. An AirBnB spokeswoman told AllThingsD: "The plot is about learning your place in the world through travel experiences."

Well, indeed. It also serves to remind us that our place is sometimes soaring in the air and sometimes buried deep in the trash, waiting to be discovered by someone, anyone, who appreciates our potential.