Je ne veux pas travailler

Pardon my French but it’s a Monday, it’s after lunch, it’s hot and I wanna whine. How I wish I had a concept to come up with or perhaps some long copy to write. I find that the best ideas often come when one is in a daze. As it is though, I’m waiting to go through (and hopefully make sense of) a direct mailer format which has perplexed me for weeks.

“Tell them to put the sticker there.”
“Eh?”
“HEE-YER!”
“Oh.”

“Insert the card here.”
“Eh?”
“HEE-YER!”
“Oh.”

“We need a flap for this.”
“Flap?”
“Yes. They have to pay you know.”
“Ah…”

That’s the way things work around here. Each and every mailer is a jumble of cards, stickers, letters, brochures and other crazy stuff that I haven’t yet seen or wish to see.

Since our target audience is supposed to be OLD PEOPLE, shouldn’t we be making things as simple as possible? Instructions like “Send this back in this envelope if you want this product, you silly old git” should suffice.

But no. We have to force these poor geriatrics to stick multiple stickers onto multiple boxes and insert multiple objects into multiple slits. You try doing that if you’ve got Parkinson’s or rheumatism.

“Maximise customer involvement” is the mantra this company works by. All I’ve got to say to that is “horseshit”. In other words, I believe the pull-rate is only 5% because the other 95% couldn’t be arsed to figure out what goes where. Neither does this copywriter in all honesty. I’ve never been one to put things together. Give me a jigsaw puzzle and I’ll ask you for the manual.

On a totally unrelated note, dictionary.com’s online translator translates “Would you like a sausage, Madam?” as “Vous aiment une saucisse, Madame?” I wonder if it’s accurate and if it sounds less dodgy in French.