21/08/2011 · 4:21 pm

Death threat fills me with love and pride.

One day in 1997 I came home to find a postcard on the doormat.

Even back then it was decidedly retro, meaning it had probably been sent by either my brother or my friend Adam. Like me, both of them will actively seek out retro or just plain bizarre postcards when abroad or in secondhand shops. I scanned the image on the front…

…then turned it over to see who it was from.

I was mistaken. It was clearly my 7-year-old daughter’s handiwork. I recognised the writing and the drawing style. More than either of those, though, I recognised her sense of humour.

The card reads:

Dear Kevin
You are doomed for you will explode with dignomight.
Love Mr Shape man

Georgia had written the card at a friend’s house after school, then placed it amongst the other mail on the doormat for me to find when I got home.

I loved the postcard in 1997 and it immediately got blu-tacked to our fridge where it’s remained for the past 14 years. Yellowing with age, it’s now off to join greetings cards, old photos and other paraphernalia from my kids in a box file marked ‘Ahhhh’.

Georgia remembers writing the card. She said she almost gave the game away right from the start when she began to write ‘Dear Dad’, then changed it to ‘Keven’ before correcting the typo. The word ‘explode’ also gave her problems, and ‘dignomight’ was clearly a word she had heard but never seen written down. All the same, she made a valiant attempt to spell it based on word constructions she was familiar with (sign, might).

Then came another touch of beautiful surrealism with the signature. Where on earth did ‘Mr Shape man’ come from? Why did he want me to explode with dynamite? Georgia says that her 7-year-old self was concerned that I might get unduly frightened by the death threat, so had filled each of the shapes with a smiley face. To soften the blow, as it were. (My appalling scan has cut off the actual smiles but they are there.)

She spelt the address slightly wrong, too, and New Malden has never been SW anything. She was remembering the SW12 postcode from our previous house in Balham. I like the added sense of peril provided by her choice of stamp. I believe that only someone with a keen and highly advanced sense of humour could have thought to create this postcard. It’s one of the reasons I am extremely proud of her, despite the odd misgivings over the sentiment in the message.

Three years later, Georgia was enjoying a 10th birthday party with several of her friends at a bowling alley in Kingston. In fact, all the alleys were occupied by partying children. At one point, the bowling was stopped and an MC-type character with a microphone  went up to each of the birthday boys and girls and got them to answer a few questions about their special day. One of the questions was “Well Lucy/Joe/Tabitha/Josh, if you could arrange for anyone at all to come and visit you at your home this afternoon, who would you choose?”

The kids thought for a bit then came up with names such as Christina, Robbie, Justin, Britney and Kylie. Then it became Georgia’s turn. “Anyone at all?” she asked.

“Yes. Anyone in the world. Anastasia, Cher, Eminem, Michael Jack…”

“I’d like Gary Larson,” said Georgia.

There are plenty of adults who don’t get The Far Side. Georgia was a fan when she was 10 years old.

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03/08/2011 · 3:07 pm

Where have all the staff gone?

I used to own a t-shirt emblazoned with the word STAFF. I’d wear it to work sometimes. Ironically, of course.

Then one day I was out of a job and wearing the t-shirt would suddenly have been very ironic indeed.

Was that around the time that the word ‘staff’ started to take on pejorative connotations? Because it seems that today, companies don’t employ staff any more. Well, they do, but they call them something else.

I think the John Lewis group was first. If you work for them, you are officially known as a ‘partner’. There’s a valid reason for this. The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees, who each receive a share of annual profits. The difference between ‘staff’ and ‘boss’ isn’t as clear-cut as it is in most companies.

‘Staff’ doesn’t convey the necessary dynamism required of its staff by McDonalds, so they go by the showbiz-meets-gangland name of ‘crew’.

Mind you, they still get awarded ‘Employee of the month’. (At once, both an achievement and an embarrassment.)

Who else is in on the act?

There are staff entrances, and there are Marks & Spencer ‘colleague’ entrances.

 

You’ve heard of Team America and Team GB. Meet ‘Team Door’. This is in a nondescript pub in north London.

Call them baps, wraps, subs or snacks, but one thing Subway isn’t famous for is sarnies.

Are these euphemisms used throughout the company, do you think? Does Subway offer its staff ‘Artists’ Discounts’? Do McDonalds staff sometimes go on ‘Crew Outings’? (No.) Would that pub in London apologise for poor service and blame the fact that they’re ‘underteamed’?

While we’re at it, have you ever wondered what happened to ’employees’? Well, they all left at the same time as the staff. In through the revolving door came their replacement, ‘human resources’. The personnel manager was replaced by an OH-SO-SINCERE VITUPERATOR…sorry, was replaced by a well-meaning human resources manager.

Or, more likely, by a whole department of them.

The decline of ‘personnel’ means this sign, from the Royal Festival Hall, clearly needs updating.

Surely ‘Authorised human resources only’?

Any other examples?

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02/08/2011 · 11:37 am

Ads from 21 years ago

At precisely 9.44pm on a hot and humid July 30th 1990, Georgia Mills took her first lungfuls of air in a maternity suite at St George’s Hospital, south London. Over the course of that busy weekend I made frequent trips to and from the hospital, was on the phone virtually non-stop and generally performed lots of new-dad duties.

I also found time to do something a bit unusual. I taped the day’s news onto the VHS recorder and gathered up a selection of Saturday’s newspapers. Then I stuffed them all into a thick black plastic bag, the kind photographers keep light-sensitive paper in, stuck a label on it saying ‘Do not open until 31st July 2011’, and hauled it up into the loft.

Fast forward to last Saturday evening and I’m in the garden with Georgia, her mum and younger sister. It’s Georgia’s 21st birthday and we’re drinking champagne while she opens cards and presents. Eventually she gets to the black bag and we all have a chance to peruse the contents.

There’s a Guardian, a Daily Star, a Daily Telegraph, an Express, Mirror and Sun. There’s also the VHS cassette and – I’d forgotten about this touch – all the congratulatory cards we’d received from friends, relatives and neighbours.

Had Georgia been born a few hours later the papers would have been of greater historical significance as they would have been full of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which kicked off the first Gulf War. As it was, the two parties were still having talks in Saudi Arabia aimed as resolving their crisis. This news occupied one column inch in the broadsheets (my, were they broad).

The main news in most of the papers was the peaceful resolution of a siege in  London’s ‘Tokyo Joe’ nightclub, although the Guardian went for ‘Trinidad gripped by chaos’.

I’m interested in this sort of stuff from a historical perspective. I especially enjoy reading the adverts. They’re a window into a world that can be strangely reassuring and utterly alien. Here’s a small selection, together with the front page of the Telegraph.

As a radio news bulletin, the front page alone would occupy more than 20 minutes of airtime.

Retro's nothing new, you know. Here's a retro ad for a fax machine, which is pleasingly ironic.

A rare colour ad. For £5,995 you got a stereo radio/cassette and 'special 'jazz' graphics'.

After 21 years, this is still very recognisably an ad for First Direct.

Whatever happened to Metro? Or Rover? Or the team responsible for this confection?

All that speed! All that power! To think, today's socks have about as much computing power

Finally, an ad from 1990 that you could easily run today without changing much.

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13/07/2011 · 1:05 pm

We provide our own emphasis

One of things I don’t like about the Daily Mail – apart from the misogyny, the homophobia, the jingoism and racial intolerance, the bile, spite and malevolence, the rejection of anything new or different, the small-mindedness, the crass populism and the utter, utter hypocrisy – is the underlinings.

They turn up in headlines like this:

‘So, who has got the fattest legs in showbiz?’

‘It’s official: immigrants do come from overseas’

‘How faceless Brussels Eurocrats plan to steal our children’s faces’

The sub-editors use these underlinings literally to underline the DM’s agenda. Each one says “You know those prejudices you’ve got? Well they’re well-founded. You’re not racist or irrational. Those dark thoughts and fears you harbour are in fact completely normal. Everything’s alright with your head. You’re amongst friends here. We’re like peas in a pod, you and I. And there’s nothing wrong with good old British peas, unlike swarthy, swan-eating foreign peas.”

Underlinings are ubiquitous in advertising copy, too, though their presence is driven by commercial rather than ideological reasons. “Can you just emphasise the price?” asks the client. “The price is a big selling point. And the phone number, can you put that in bold, along with the web address, and make sure they’re mentioned up front. And somehow draw attention to the ‘offer closes’ date. Oh, and underline the free set of steak knives. In fact, could you emphasise everything and makes sure it all gets mentioned first?”

Copywriters generally end up accommodating at least some of the clients’ wishes because, well, we like to eat. The result, though, is all too often deeply unattractive ads and, worse, a patronising shoutiness that doesn’t trust people to read the ad ‘properly’.

I challenge you to check out the current top 10 titles on the Amazon best-selling fiction list and find any examples of underlining, emboldening or italicising used as a means of emphasis. OK, the literature vs advert comparison is slightly disingenuous. Books want you to get involved; ads want you to get online, get on the phone or get down the shops.

Occasionally, I suppose, the way to get people to do that is to yell and hector them. After all, the market stallholder doesn’t outsell his rivals by adopting a Sergeant Wilson-style sales patter: “I say, would you mind awfully looking at the rather generous price of my splendid tomatoes? In your own time.”

But not all ads need to shout and nor do they have to tell you how to read the copy. If it’s expressed well, the voice in your head can detect the importance of a message or the uniqueness of a proposition. It knows when to invest copy with whimsy, breathlessness, charm or urgency. It can also tell when a word needs emphasis.

I was reminded of this the other day after reading that the Metropolitan Police were introducing a new ‘101’ number for non-emergency calls. Presumably this will replace the distinctly unmemorable number they launched a few years back with the same purpose in mind. But I kept the little door-drop because I liked the way it allowed people to provide their own emphasis:

Admit it: your inner voice put an inflection on ‘has’, didn’t it? Then you read it again and emphasised both ‘is and ‘has’. See? I rest my case.

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09/05/2011 · 4:07 pm

Streetview weirdness

I noticed this little oddity the other day.

You should be looking at Cafe Bianco and MD Electronics, two shops in Kingston-upon-Thames. Mouse over the shop on the right and a rectangle appears, sometimes with the magnifying glass icon and sometimes without. When the rectangle is showing WITHOUT the glass, click. Then see what happens to the shop on the left.

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04/05/2011 · 3:31 pm

“You’re through to Lloyds TSB, how can we anger you today?”

If you’re going abroad and intend to use your debit or credit card, the banks advise that you tell them before you go. This is so that when their software detects a deviation from your normal spending pattern, they’ll know the reason.

They don’t advise you by phone or letter or in ads, of course. You won’t see it printed on your statement. In fact they keep the advice pretty much to themselves, until you get home and complain that your card was unaccountably refused when you tried to buy a rail ticket in Segovia, for example. That’s when they advise you.

Next time, they say, you should inform us when you intend to go abroad. Thanks a bunch, you say. But you remember the advice and, next time you’ve got an overseas trip coming up, you set about giving the bank a call. Which is what I did the other week.

You have a cunning plan. You just don’t know what it is yet

For the purposes of this story, let’s pretend you’re a criminal – go on, let’s – and you intend to defraud a bank using my credit card. In fact, let’s make it even more interesting by pretending that you’ve also got hold of me. You’re holding me in your evil lair, bound and helpless and ready to divulge all the security details of my credit card. This is, after all, the sort of scenario the banks must have in mind when they devise their stringent security procedures.

So. You’ve got me, you’ve got my card and you’ve got a phone. It isn’t strictly accurate to say you’ve also got the beginnings of a plan, because you haven’t. In fact, you haven’t a fucking clue how you’re going to go about defrauding the bank. This explains why you didn’t just walk into Currys and buy loads of things with plugs on the end of them or visit the nearest cashpoint armed with my PIN. Instead of these obvious options, you call the number on the back of the credit card. It’s entirely plausible that all sorts of frauds start that way. Isn’t it? LloydsTSB evidently thinks so.

Off to a bad start

You call the number and listen to the options, none of them being particularly appropriate to the scheme you haven’t hatched yet. In fact, the final option tells you that if you want to talk about your credit card, you have to call a different number entirely. Eh? So why wasn’t this the number featured on the back of the card? Never mind. You call this new number. You’re gonna get rich!

The master criminal gets to work

When the automated phone service asks you to key in the credit card number, you’re all prepared. Tap tap tap tap. Same with the security number. Tap tap tap. This is so easy! Then it asks you to key in my date of birth. You prod me with a stick. Ow! I tell you, and you key it in. A human comes to the phone and greets you by name.

“Hello Mr Newmalden, you’re through to LloydsTSB, how can I help you?”

You’re in! Time to enact the crime of the century.

“Hi there. Well it’s just that I’m going abroad soon, and I believe you advise customers to alert you beforehand.”

You idiot! Why the fuck did you say that? Call yourself a criminal? How on earth do you think saying that will make you any richer or buy you more stuff? It sounds like the single most implausible crime in the history of criminality. But that doesn’t stop it setting off an alarm in the call centre lady’s head. Ah, the old ‘I’m going abroad’ ruse. She won’t fall for that one too easily.

“I see. I’ll just have to run through a few security questions with you.”

What? More security? No matter. You get ready with the stick.

“Could you give me the third and fifth characters of your password, please?”

“Sure. The third and fifth characters of my password, you say?”

I blurt them out without the need for any prodding.

“It’s c and j”, you say. You’re driving a bulldozer through the bank’s so-called security!

“And are there any other account holders on this card?”

“Any other account holders?”

I shake my head.

“No.”

“OK. What was the last balance payment you made to the card?”

You repeat the question, and I tell you that I paid the entire balance off.

“He, I mean I paid the full amount”, you say.

“Yes, but what was the amount?”

“Er, the amount, let’s see…”

You prod me with the stick, but I don’t know the actual figure. I think it was around £700.

“It was about £700.”

“No! I want the ACTUAL AMOUNT!”

You prod, jab and thwack me with the stick, but it won’t help. I’m tied up in a master criminal’s secret lair, not sitting at my desk at home. You give up with me and resort to guesswork.

“£710? £714.28?”

“Incorrect. You have failed the security test. I cannot proceed with your request.”

Bank 1, Customer 0

Your fraudulent shoulders sag, your criminal spirits slump. This totally mad scheme to prise money out of my account through the expedient of pretending that you’re going abroad and, er, well, you hadn’t really thought any further than that, has come to nothing. You untie me and go back to your previous job as a procurement clerk in Thanet.

This, then, was the end result of my attempt to act on the advice that banks (quietly) give their customers about going on holiday. The thing is, there’s no way I could easily have answered that last question because I just don’t carry that sort of information around with me. Who does? But in the security-obsessed world inhabited by the mindless jobsworths who concoct such tests, this isn’t good enough.

The lady at the bank probably congratulated herself and the bank’s ‘robust’ security for thwarting yet another dastardly plot to commit a heinous crime, when all they did was piss a customer off.

Grrr.

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07/04/2011 · 11:58 am

Energy ad fail

EDF Energy are the new sponsors of the London Eye, as anyone who has been with 100 metres of the Eye won’t have failed to notice. Their branding is everywhere. (They’ve sneakily hidden the stainless steel plaque that commemorates the life of the chief engineer of the project, who died shortly after its completion. Presumably on the grounds that it mentions the name of the original sponsors, British Airways.)

Anyway, EDF Energy support a low carbon future, which is nice. ‘Supporting a low carbon future’, their strapline noncommittally  asserts. They obviously like to be seen as taking the issue very seriously.

Which makes me wonder how on earth they can reconcile that with the sentiment expressed in their latest ad. An after-dark trip on the Eye, the ad states, is ‘lavish – like taking a cab to the corner shop.’  Lavish? Selfish, more like.

How many people failed to spot the contradiction here?

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06/04/2011 · 7:58 pm

Cheeky clock

Years ago, I used to be sent direct mail by a promotional giftware company. They did things like personalised t-shirts, pens, key fobs and mouse mats. The idea was that I’d order 500 ballpoint pens, each bearing the message ‘I write better than this pen! Kevin Mills 012 345 6789’, and send them to my clients and prospects. I never bothered because, well, because of lots of reasons, the likely complete ineffectiveness of such a sales technique being perhaps the most compelling.

But in the nature of such things, they kept sending me direct mail, often including free samples with ‘your name or slogan here’ printed on them. Then one day they announced that they could also personalise wall clocks, and would I care for a free sample? This appealed to me. I actually needed a clock. I was never going to order dozens to send to my clients or prospects, as at the time I only had about three clients and, as now, no prospects *pathos face*. But the promotional company wasn’t to know that.

A free wallclock. With ‘my name or slogan’ on it. And with no intention of ever engaging with the promotions company beyond getting a freebie out of them. Suddenly it became obvious what message the clock should carry.

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29/03/2011 · 3:38 pm

Manchester ‘lippy kids’ build rocket

Elbow. Photo: AP

A group of youths from a Moss Side housing estate have made history by building a working rocket after one of them heard Elbow’s stirring paean to the country’s disaffected young.

“It came on the radio and something about the words made me think,” said Troy Harding, 22. “I nicked the single and played it to me mates on the corner and we thought, yeah, why not?”

Troy and his friends Liam, Connor, Ashley and Josh used their extensive knowledge of the local area to beg, borrow and steal the ingredients necessary for the construction of a 2m-long rocket.

“Some of it were easy, like nicking me mam’s sugar and getting hold of fertiliser. The potassium nitrate were a problem, though, and the guy in the corner shop looked at me funny when I asked him for some permanganate salts. But you’d be surprised how easily the sight of a simian stroll can persuade people to hand things over.”

The construction took over two months. “We worked from the moment we woke up right through to six o’clock each evening. That’s over four hours a day,” recounts Josh, 23 and, like the rest of the ‘rocket scientists’, one of the region’s long-term unemployed. “As the rocket took shape I remember thinking these days are right golden, just like in the song.”

The rocket was tested successfully last Friday. A sophisticated guidance system saw it land and explode in the Comet car park, a diversionary tactic that allowed the boys to strip the shelves of iPads, Sony PSPs and Nintendo 3DSs.

“Makes a change from stealing booze and hour-long kisses,” added Troy. “If I see that Guy Garvey, I’ll shake him by the hand.”

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15/02/2011 · 3:02 pm

A ball-shaped piece of freedom

The BNM family has enjoyed two trips to the USA. Once we went up and down the east coast. Then we went up and down the west coast. Never been to the middle bits or to any of the vowel states.

I’m not overly-excited by cars or by driving, but I do like driving in the States.

The open highway, the scenery, the roadside diners, the advertising hoardings, the muffler men.

Visiting gas stations was an eye-opener. There was the obscenely low cost of petrol for one thing. When we last there, it was less than a tenth of what we were paying in the UK. No wonder they all drive cars as big as buses.

Then there was the simple act of filling your car with fuel. Because in America, once you’ve pulled the trigger on the petrol pump, it stays pulled. A little ratchet thingy clicks into place and keeps the flow of fuel running.

You can walk off and clean bugs off your windscreen, stock up with water or do whatever you like. The nozzle will just hang there pumping gas into your fuel tank until you squeeze the trigger again or the nozzle’s sensor indicates that the tank is full, whereupon it automatically cuts off.

Why isn’t there a similar system in the UK? The petrol dispensers can’t be that different. I can only assume the ratchet mechanism has been removed for the UK market.

Things are always being changed ‘to suit the UK market’. This normally means removing the taste, strength or functionality of something before we can be trusted with it. For example, it was only recently that the Heineken sold in the UK started to bear any relationship at all to the Heineken sold in almost every other country of the world. I could give you other examples but they all seem to be booze-related and you might start to wonder about me.

So, back to petrol pumps and the fact that we have to stand there like dorks when filling up the car.

I’ve found a way round it.

I have. I have overcome the senseless petrol forecourt tyranny enforced upon us by the ruthless Petrol Retailers Association working in collusion with their arrogant Whitehall overlords.

I just hit upon the idea of using a tennis ball. We keep some in the boot to throw for the dog. You just jam the tennis ball between the trigger and the trigger guard, then go off and explore your new-found freedom while the tank fills up.

I can’t tell you how happy this discovery had made me.

The first time I tried out the idea I immediately wondered what to do with the time that was now mine. I know – wash the windscreen. Trouble was, there was no bucket of soapy water with a sponge in it. Perhaps that’s another thing you only get in the States. There were no paper towels, either. The only thing I could put to use was a pair of flimsy see-through gloves. What could I possibly do with them? No idea.

So I waited, but not too close to the car. If anyone else drove up, I wanted them to see me and think: “That guy’s standing a little bit too far from his car to be able comfortably to hold the petrol nozzle. Wait…he’s not holding it at all. But how can his tank be filling up? I don’t understand. Hold on…he’s got some sort of device wedged into the petrol pump’s trigger mechanism. It’s *rubs eyes* it’s a common or garden tennis ball!”

But no one did.

Think about this: If the average UK motorist spends 1 minute 15 seconds filling up his car with a tankful of unleaded, drives 12,000 miles a year and averages 32 mpg, he really should take a long, hard look at reducing his carbon footprint.

But at least the tennis ball idea will save him literally minutes a year.

A standard-issue tennis ball successfully undergoing forecourt trials in South London

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