First - what you need to know. I work as a System Administrator of a Windows NT network. This means I get on all kinds of mailing lists for people to send me promotional material.
I just got back to my desk a little while ago and found a white envelope on it. I picked it up and it rattled. Upon opening I discovered a pill bottle with three little white pills in it.
On the outside of the bottle it says:
“For speedy data recovery, take 2 and call us now!”
and the name of the company.
The pills are actually Tic-Tacs.
Is it me? This seems weird. Their promotional gimick centers around pretending to send me prescription drugs.
I’ll admit, it does assure that I’ll remember the company. But not as a company I have a high opinion of.
That’s the weirdest gimmick I’ve heard of. Maybe they want you to have nice fresh breath when you tell people their server crashed? What’s next, Altoids with “Lemmon 714” stamped on them?
I do system admin stuff, but for Unix. All I ever get are “free” subscriptions to magazines that, if you actually paid for them, would be $500 a year. Who are they kidding, anyway?
[hijack]
No shit about those subscriptions being stupidly priced!
I received a book from one of the companies we use (SQA and load-testing software) that was 47 pages and had a $495 price tag! WTF?
[/hijack]
We got a mailing from a printing company with two aspirin enclosed. Their gimmick was “After dealing with your current printer, you probably have a headache. Take these and then call us to get rid of it.” I laughed and threw it in the garbage.
I find it interesting how we’ve become dependent on prescription drugs…I remember some advertisements for that purple pill (don’t remember the name). They showed an older woman walking on the beach and an 800 number. Nothing about symptoms, or what the drug did, or anything. Just a pill and a phone number.
Somewhere out there people are saying “A new prescription drug??? MY GAWD, what if I need it!!! WHAT STRANGE DISEASE MIGHT I HAVE THAT’S GOING UNTREATED??? Quick, ma, hand me the phone!”
Actually, after close inspection I did eat one of the Tic Tacs. When I mentioned this to my co-workers, they thought it pretty stupid of me. The more I think about it the more I think they may be right.
remember what happened to Alice when she went chasing rabbits! maybe these alleged Tic-Tacs are nothing more than a small, minty tasting microtransmitters designed to broadcast your every gastronomic gurgle to the NSA and echelon!
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they are not out to get you. And the question the springs to mind: *Are you paranoid enough? *
That’s not the weirdest marketing promo I’ve heard of. A couple of months ago a Silicon Valley law firm sent wood crates with model hand grenades to a bunch of startups. I think the pitch was something about preventing small legal issues from becoming big bombs, but a bunch of the companies who received these completely freaked out and called PD and the bomb squad.
The “Beep-Beep” stirs a vague memory, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen B5.
As for the idea that I’ve swallowed some kind of tracking device - great, just what I need. If anyone sees a web site named “Trion’s Intestinal Web-Cam” let me know, 'kay?
I get my share of freebies (I’m a sports editor at a small paper). Most of the stuff consists of wretched T-shirts bearing logos of companies I have no intention of placing on my personal body.
One time, I got a golf club. One golf club. I’m no expert, but it appears to be some kind of wedge. Now all I need to do is get a succession of other companies to each give me a different club so I can have a full bag of them collecting dust instead of just this one.
Another time, I got two T-shirts from the San Jose Clash (now the San Jose Earthquakes) soccer team. Crummy shirts, but dynamic presentation! The shirts had been trash-compacted into a small disk, about as tall as if you stacked four drink coasters on top of each other and just a little wider. I never imagined anyone would ever want to make a T-shirt that small. I opened one – to see what the heck it was – and saved the other one in its disk format, just because it’s neat.
Sounds like similar presentation to a tee my Oz friend Mel sent me. It’s compacted into the (approximate) size of a hockey puck. Directions say to immerse in water. I never have, as it just seemed to be such a weirdly cool thing I couldn’t bring myself to alter it. I asked Mel about it and she said they’re fairly common in that part of the world (or at least were at the time, several years ago).
If you want more explanation, Sinclair tricked G’Kar into believing he’d swallowed a microscopic tracking device. He pointed a remote control at G’Kar and it beeped, supposedly activating the device. As G’Kar stormed out of Sinclair’s office, and met Garibaldi in the lift. Obviously in on Sinclair’s ploy, he pointed at G’Kar’s abdomen and said, “Beep beep!” Londo remarked upon this, as was related by Narile.
I now return you to your regularly-scheduled thread.
