I swore I wouldn't prostitute myself......

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

…but my boss insisted, and now I feel a bit cheap and dirty!

I work in retail, and for months now my company has been having these “song contests” where we write a jingle about the latest sale and sing it on voice mail and you can win prizes. This week’s prize is a $25 AmEx gift cheque.

Now when this whole sad thing started, as a regional thing, there were some cute songs, quick and easy and silly. I didn’t join in because I just wasn’t inspired to sing about Buy One, Get One Half Off sales. It struck the fancy of the Vice president, however, and now it has gotten out of hand. It seemed like the songs that won were the ones that shoved as much “corporate speak” and buzz words into a song, with no regard to timing, meter, music, matching the rhythym…there were some incredibly horrible songs that won merely because they mentioned the VP’s name! Some of our younger teammates set their jingles to rap songs no one could understand, or butchered obscure country western tunes (another easy way to win, since the VP is Texan) No longer was it a company jingle contest, but a self-serving, cram as many buzzwords in as possible, unintelligible mess.

And then they made it mandatory.

Yep, the competition went nationwide, and our region wasn’t submitting enough entries, so they required every store to come up with a song. Now if people have the time and talent and the inclination, I have no problem with them entering a song. But none of us at our store wanted to do it, and we’d rather be selling than sitting around writing jingles. But they made it mandatory, and my boss threw something quick, easy and silly together and actually won one week.

Then Christmas came along, our busy season, and mercifully the contest went away. But today, they announced that it is back…$25 a day to the day’s winner…and I’m broke, so my boss kept bugging me to write something, anything…kept singing silly bits of drivel, picking tunes…and the only way I could shut her up was to come up with something on my own. So I set it to the tune of an old standard, the name eludes me right now, and kept it simple, and got the meter and the rhyme right and the timing and I went into the backroom and sang it into the phone and now I feel dirty.

And I have three more possible jingles racing around in my head.

And the regional manager called to tell me I have a great voice and how happy she is that I finally entered and what a great song it was, and tomorrow morning everyone in the region will be forced to listen to this on voicemail, and they’ll know I sold myself for the chance at $25 to fill up my gas tank so I can go to a stinking training session at a store 30 miles away. (That, by the way is the worst part of this…every morning we are forced to listen to all the entries on our corpoarte voicemail…if you forget the code to Skip and Delete you are stuck listening to the world’s worst jingles).

So. Did anyone else sell their soul (or body) today?

2

I think I’d rather scrub toilets. Ewwws!

My condolences!

3

Not today, but a lifetime ago, yeah. A complete stranger wanted a kiss, I told her it’d cost her five bucks. She ponied up the dough, and the transaction was made.

Having long, teased-out hair in the late-80’s had its advantages.

4

Heh. I wrote a few Christmas jingles for Qantas Airlines and won a round trip for two to Australia.

One man’s prostitution is another man’s creative genius. :slight_smile:

5

*Ponies * now? Sheesh! What happened to the sheep?

:wink:

6

Just make sure you end it with:

“And that ain’t HAAAAAAAY!”

7

In THAT tone, that’s how the gay ponies come out of the closet…from…hay! to…

HAAAAaaaaaaYYYYYYYYYYY!!!

8

Eh. Money’s money. At least no exchanges of bodily fluid were involved.

9

Don’t worry about it.

For your next, however, come up with a jingle that, on the surface, seems to be another upbeat cheery song about the company, but which some of the lines have a double meaning (something you can deny knowing about).

10

So far, I haven’t won…they didn’t even mention the contest on voicemail today. But tomorrow’s morning newsletter announces the contest, and this is where it gets worse: The daily prize is $25, but there is a regional prize ($100) and a grand prize of $500…but you can only win those if you not only have the best song, but also make your three goals for the week. Apparently they don’t really want to give any money away, because making all three goals is not easy to do, at least not in our region. But last week? Before this contest started? I made my goals…blew them away. That’s the story of my life…always too early. Last year they started a program where if you got a 100% on a Secret Shopper evaluation, you got $50, and a pin. I got 100% on my Shop…the month before the program started. Haven’t been Shopped since. And the 100% I got a year before that? The Secret Shopper made it up. I got a great score, but the whole scenario listed on the form was fictional. I mentioned it to the regional, and she said, “You know, I think we’ll just take the 100% any way we can.”

So cross your fingers for me…we’ll see if I win for Monday by default (I bet no one else entered that day)!

11

Okay, here’s the update…I won for Monday. Now I’m in the running for one of three top prizes, but our sales are slow this week, so there’s really no hope. I’m hoping I get the money at a meeting tomorrow, but probably not until next week…