Apparently, PETA wanted to put this ad in the Super Bowl, but it was deemed too raunchy.
Um, PETA? Yeah, I’m talking to you. You know who watches the Super Bowl, right? They’ll love the ladies, but you’d have to pry the BBQ ribs from their cold dead hands.
88
Once again, I present you with an image that defies comprehension.
I’m fairly certain it’s supposed to be some sort of animal. Beyond that, I’m going on pure speculation. I first thought “rabbit,” but the tail is wrong. Then “dinosaur with mouth open facing backwards,” but that doesn’t explain the pointy thing sticking out of its belly.
Let’s try seeing it in context. It’s part of the logo for MacDonald Auto Source. So perhaps it represents an animal that is fast like a cheetah or reliable like an elephant. No, neither of those work. After having given it serious thought (seriously), I think it is a kangaroo. The tail and rear legs are right, and the two things extending to the left from its head could be very large ears. The three protuberances on the right might be, from the top, a long, narrow face/snout; two front legs; and a pouch either gaping open or with a pointy joey’s head sticking out. Let’s go with that theory.
Now the trouble is to try and explain why an automobile dealership would want to associate itself with a mammal that is not exactly the model of smooth, elegant transportation. “We hop to your service.”?
I think I might make a habit of ridiculing strange or stupid logos. It doesn’t take much effort, and it guarantees me a steady stream of W titles.
81
No time for a real post today – slammed at work. But I saw a TV ad last night that made me wonder: Electrasol (the dishwasher detergent) is changing its name to “Finish.” So if you go to http://www.electrasol.com, you get an Electrasol welcome screen. But once you enter, BAM! – you’re in “Finish” land.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no big proponent of the importance of “branding,” but why the heck would you take a name with decades of equity and ditch it? Any ideas?
80
Everyone look at the image to the right and take a guess as to what it is. Medical instrument? Medieval torture device? Map of the first few metres of the yellow brick road?
No? Well maybe seeing it in context would help: click here.
Still not sure? By now, some New Brunswickers may have figured it out, but for the rest of you, I’ll end the suspense: it’s a fiddlehead.
Fiddleheads are very young ferns that are just starting to unroll. They are considered a culinary delicacy here in New Brunswick*, and people gleefully tromp out into boggy forests every spring to pick them. They are steamed or fried or sometimes (shudder) boiled, and served with butter and lemon. You can read more about them, and see pictures of what they ACTUALLY look like, here.
They are being used as part of a NB Tourism plan to designate certain scenic drives around the province. To me, this makes about as much sense as writing our highway exit signs in Farsi. I can hear the conversation now:
Texan tourist to tourism employee: “Where would ah go to git a look at that there Bay o Fundy ah hear so much about?
Tourism employee, brightly: “Just follow the fiddlehead signs, sir!”
TT: “The WHAT?”
TE: “The fiddlehead signs. The signs with the fiddleheads on them!”
TT: “What the goldarn heck is a fiddlehead?”
TE: “It’s a young fern, sir. We eat them. They look like the ends of violins, (sheepishly) …kind of.”
TT: “Now yer jist pullin mah leg.”
TE: “No, honest!”
TT: ”OK, Ah’ll jist look for the sign with the plant that looks like the end of a violin, then.”
TE: “Well, actually, sir, the signs don’t really look like that. They look like a medieval torture device.”
Hilarity ensues.
Even people who live here are confused. I don’t know how we expect tourists to figure it out.
* Of course, we also eat seaweed, so…
77
Smoking isn’t cool. Everyone knows that it’s bad for your health, makes you smell nasty, turns your teeth and fingers yellow, and discourages people from kissing you. It also leaves a big mess wherever smokers congregate, and is increasingly inconvenient because of restrictions on where you may smoke. It can also lead to addiction, which makes being unable to have a cigarette (say on a long air trip) very uncomfortable. Even teens know all this.
So why, then, is teen smoking on the rise, even at a time when fewer adults than ever use tobacco? Some people are blaming the tobacco companies – saying that by making flavoured cigarettes, and selling them in smaller (more affordable) quantities, they are marketing directly at teens. These people want big tobacco to stop these practices, as well as cease all forms of marketing. Here in New Brunswick, starting in 2009, stores that sell smokables are going to have to hide them from view. (They already do this next door in Nova Scotia and PEI.) And of course it’s illegal to sell smokes to a minor.
This is, of course, ridiculous. No-one advertises marijuana or displays it in a store front and not only is it illegal to sell it to teens; it’s just plain illegal. Yet I haven’t noticed a marked decline in pot usage despite these measures. Making cigarettes harder to get is not going to reduce teen smoking, because as I said at the top, smoking isn’t cool.
But smokers are.
That’s why they smoke. They are the types of people who do romantic, dangerous, edgy, prohibited, difficult things. These are kids that skateboard down stair rails or do back flips off cliffs into the water or defy the teacher and get sent to the principal. They are what every teen wants to be: cool. So this predisposition to “coolness” in their personality makes them smoke, and by association, smoking itself becomes cool. Except it’s not. The proof of that is seen in the adult population, where willfully doing a stupid and expensive thing is NOT seen as cool, and as a result very few “cool” adults smoke. (Think about the crowd of folks you see clustered around the butt-catcher on their coffee break when it’s -20º out — any of them look like Brad Pitt? Didn’t think so.)
So instead of making smoking more difficult (and therefore, more desirable) for teens, let’s make smoking more available to them. So if you’re a teen, you can have unprotected sex with your boyfriend, ski way too fast down a hill, go wakeboarding at 50 knots, do BASE jumping, or smoke a cigarette. They’re all dangerous, they all give you a thrill, and they’re all discouraged but not (in my new model) prohibited by society.
The only thing different is that smoking is addictive and leads to long term health problems. So let’s remove that part. Manufacture cigarettes that don’t have any of the bad stuff in them, but look and taste just like real smokes. And put ‘em next to the Doritos at the convenience store. And price them way lower than “adult” smokes, so only those people who are already addicted to nicotine would pay top dollar for the harmful ones.
You can drop my Nobel Prize off at the house.
68
No post tomorrow because I’m taking the day off work. It’s another professional day at school, so we’ll all be home. I will also be putting the finishing touches on a presentation that I have to give at the Moncton Cultural Forum on Saturday morning. I will be using PowerPoint. For those of you who aren’t familiar with my views on PowerPoint, they can be read here.
Here is a screenshot of the “Slide Sorter” view of the PowerPoint deck that was prepared for me to use:
Yes, that is what it looks like. Seventeen pages of text so thick you can’t even make it out. I have 15 minutes to present. I tried reading one of the pages aloud, and it took me 2½ minutes. Do the math.
Here is the slide sorter view of the slides that I created to use instead:
Granted, my version will require that I actually speak, instead of just letting the audience read the slides, but, hey – I figure that’s my value-add.
46
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no cheerleading squad when it comes to the Moncton daily Times&Transcript. I have chastised them in the past for spelling errors, not knowing the definition of words, even mistakes in front-page headlines. So it’s perhaps ironic that today’s post is about how hard it seems for me to get my hands on a copy of the darn thing.
The home delivery service was fairly good up until a few months ago. The paper was always in the hooks provided for that purpose under our mailbox, except in rain or snow, when it was put inside the mailbox. Very nice. Sure, the occasional mornings when I left for work at 7:00, it wasn’t there yet (even though it’s supposed to be), but I can cut them some slack there. Then, an apparently catastrophic event in the T&T world occurred: our paper-carrier quit.
We then descended into a Hades of random delivery times (almost always after I left for work at 8:00); random delivery locations (side door, front door, end of driveway, front lawn), and random content (sections missing, two copies of sections, sometimes two entire papers).
Well, stoic and embattled media consumers that we are, we soldiered on. Then, two weeks ago, the unthinkable happened. Our Friday paper arrived without the TV Times section. Now, for the most part, the TV schedules are useless, especially when we have the cable feed which offers far more accurate and deeper information about what’s on. HOWEVER, this section also contains what for me is about 75% of the reason I even subscribe to the rag: the NY Times Sunday Crossword.
After my screams of horror had subsided, I calmly called the T&T delivery department and was told by their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that there would be a three minute wait for a live person, but I could use the automated service. So I did, and was assured by the nice computer-voice lady (complete with background sound effects of a keyboard being typed – very thorough, I thought) that a new (complete) paper was on its way. This was 9:00 or so in the morning. By 1:30, it hadn’t arrived, so I called again and used the trick that pays off for me about 50% of the time: after being told about the 3 minute wait, I hit zero about 5 times, and was rewarded with a human answer after one ring. The lady was skeptical that I had placed a re-order over 4 hours ago, but checked the system and verified that I was not, in fact, a psychopath who got his kicks by lying to customer service people. So she promised that the TV Times would be sent right over. It never was.
Fast forward to this past Friday. The paper was actually there in the hooks at 8:00, but when I got to work I found that the TV Times was missing AGAIN. (Conspiracy?) So I called, got the “3-minute wait” message, used my zeros trick again, and spoke to a live person who agreed to send me a new paper. But I kept her on the phone for a bit to tell her about my last weekend’s experience and the general crappy service our neighbourhood has been getting. She told me that all that would be over now, since they had finally assigned a regular carrier to our route. Yay! But she also told me that remedial deliveries are NEVER made after noon, so the lady I called at 1:30 the week before was incorrect in promising me a new paper.
So then I asked her why the IVR always says there’s a 3 minute wait, when she was obviously sitting right there ready to take my call. She didn’t have an opinion on that, saying she had never heard what the IVR says to callers. What’s up with that?!? If I ran a call centre, the FIRST THING I’d do is get newly recruited agents to call the number that they will be answering, and listen to what a real caller will be hearing before they speak to an agent.
So to sum up: the T&T lied to me about the post-noon remedial deliveries; and the T&T lies to EVERYBODY who calls their delivery service number (about there being a 3-minute wait) to push them into the automated system.
ASIDE: For those of you who wonder how I made it through that weekend without my Crossword, that was our trip to St Andrews, so I had distractions to keep my mind off my grief.
28
My daughter goes to a great school. One of the things that makes it great is the respect that permeates its halls: respect for teachers, respect for students, respect for neighbours and the community in general, respect for past and present members of our armed forces, respect for police officers and firefighters, and respect for our nation. The latter is demonstrated each day by the playing of O Canada every morning over the school’s PA system, and the fact that EVERYONE, whether they are in a classroom or an office or a hallway; whether they are a student, teacher or parent; stops and stands still during the duration of the song.
Except my daughter’s grade 2 class.
You see, due to expanding student enrollment, the school had to add what we used to call a “portable” classroom — although this one looks pretty permanent. And that’s my daughter’s classroom. This addition was one of a series of construction projects that happened over the summer and are still happening. And to quote Rodney Dangerfield, it seems that this classroom, “can’t get no respect.” So they don’t yet (a month into the school year) have proper furniture, for example. Or a connection to the school PA system to hear important announcements or the national anthem. And, ironically, the room that would have been theirs, but was scheduled to be converted into administrative offices, still sits empty and untouched.
I fully understand that when there are multiple projects being worked on by a finite set of tradespeople, not everything can happen at once. But wouldn’t you think that the students would come first? I have a theory for why this particular class is being de-prioritized: it has consistently the strongest support network of parent volunteers of any class in the school. It was true when most of the same kids were together two years ago in kindergarten, and it was true last year in grade one. I think that the school administration is (likely subconsciously) figuring that that particular class can withstand hardship better than other groups in the school, so they get bumped down the to-do list.
That kind of makes sense on the surface, and is a prevalent theme throughout society – the silent get little attention, while the “squeaky wheels” get greased. But it’s BAD MARKETING. You should treat your BEST customers (or parents or students) best. Then they become even more rabid fans and spread the joy and the message and infect even more people with zeal and excitement.
Think about it – if only complainers and whiners get what they want, soon everyone will learn to complain and whine. But if the promoters and the cheerers and the helpers and the fans get all the best, soon (almost) all the people will be on the bandwagon.
I get quite a bit of spam trying to be a comment to one of my blog posts. This problem is not unique to me – all bloggers have the same trouble, and most blogging software applications have filters built in to catch it. This morning, though, this slipped through:
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It’s almost poetic in how it just barely fails to make sense. I can’t figure out why any person (or machine) would be propogating it. If you go to that URL, it’s a Romanian porn site, so I guess the idea is to just get the link out there and disguise it in a bunch of prose so it passes through spam filters. But really, don’t people who want porn know where to go for it? Why hide the facts about what you’re promoting? If someone can explain this to me, I’d appreciate it.
I really hate waiting.
I read somewhere recently that people who are poor at time management are that way in part because they don’t want to show up early for things and then have to wait, so they try to shave everything down to the split second and arrive EXACTLY on time. Of course, life intervenes and they end up late. So the advice of this article was to arrange your life to be early for everything. Then, if something happens to delay you, you will still be on time. If no delays occur, you will be early and have to wait a bit, but you should EMBRACE that time. You should cherish the free time that has been granted you and savour it in a zen-like state.
The part about planning to be early is great advice, but cherishing wasted time is hogwash. As I wrote about here, most of us in North America grew up in a culture where sitting idle is nearly a sin. Whether that’s good or bad, it’s my reality, and I really really don’t like someone else’s incompetence or thoughtlessness or disregard for the value of my time to cost me any of it.
Two examples of this occurred recently: I was buying furniture on the weekend and my credit card was declined. (Mastercard noticed that I had made a large furniture purchase the previous weekend, too, and had put one of those cautionary holds on my account. I was able to get it unlocked in one call.) When I called to clear it up, the IVR system played me some kind of ad for some new service before it would let me proceed. Now, someone calling the number on the back of their card is unlikely to be looking for anything other than rapid assistance – why waste their time with an interruption marketing message? Then, I had to enter my card number on the phone’s touch pad. Of course, the first thing the human I eventually spoke with asked me was my card number. Why bother with the touch pad entry?
The other was the first furniture purchase. They were throwing in a coffee table for free. (Great!) Then, because this caused such a kaffufle with their payment processing system, it took about 30 minutes for them to take my money. Can’t you shield the customer from this sort of systemic inefficiency? Run my card, get my signature, then figure out how to put it into the computer after I’m gone.
What sparked this rant was a post at Seth’s blog. It’s really bad marketing to value your customers’ time less than your own.
