There's an outbreak of chicken pox at work. People are disappearing for a week at home covering themselves in calamine lotion. And everyone is unaccountably itchy and paranoid about every sniff and cough, even if they are perfectly well.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I remain unaffected. My mother had enough foresight to send me off to play with every other sick child on our street when I was small, so I'd got through most of the childhood diseases by the time I was 7. Pox parties seem less common now which I think is a shame. My mother was of the opinion that, given the potentially terrible consequences particularly of mumps in adult men, it was better to get everything over and done with as early as possible. I'm sure it must have been a real chore for her to put up with an ill little boy - I complain now when I feel sick so have no reason to believe I wasn't hard work as a child - but I'm very grateful. It should mean, I hope, that I still have the chicken pox antibodies and won't get ill now. Fingers crossed.
How could Heinz have made such a critical miscalculation of judgment? Their decision to withdraw an entirely innocent, rather well made and frankly quite humorous advert has filled the media over the course of today. Here it is, by the way...
Now, there could be a number of things going on here.
It is possible that Heinz were genuinely shocked by the complaints about the advert, and, believing that the small number of complainants reflected a much larger silent number of people who'd potentially not buy their products, decided it was safer to withdraw it. That would be spineless, backward and somewhat naive frankly.
Alternatively, this could be slightly more sinister. The video is available on YouTube. The advert is being talked about widely. Heinz is getting huge amounts of publicity out of the argument. The problem is... if that's the case, they've calculated that offending gay consumers and sparking a boycott is a price worth paying to get their product noticed. That, frankly, is more homophobic than the 202 complainants to the ASA.
In unrelated news, research from the US has put Heinz Ketchup at the top of the tree in terms of brand equity, measuring consumers attitudes across six areas: familiarity, quality, purchase consideration, brand expectations, distinctiveness and trust. The potential problem for Heinz is that trust, certainly among gay consumers, has just taken a serious knock. Either they are inept handlers of consumer opinion who refuse to stick to their guns. Or they are expert handlers of consumer opinion who are willing to trade one group's offence off against another's lack of concern. They might have been widely congratulated by the gay community for making a rare advert that normalised, for the general public, a display of affection between two men. Instead, gay consumers are about to turn and walk away.
What a disaster. Henry John Heinz believed that "to do a common thing uncommonly well brings success." I can't help but think that Heinz have managed to do exactly the opposite, doing an uncommon thing uncommonly badly.
He'd certainly be an interesting choice, and to be honest, his support of Labour came as a bit of a surprise to me. I suppose I labour under the misapprehension that business people will be politically conservative, though I realise that perception is somewhat behind the times. While he's hedged his bets in response to suggestions that he's being talked about, I for one think he might be good for London. Apart from anything else, I'd love to see the moment he told Boris, "You're a total shambles. You're fired."
The other thing it signals is that Ken can't take his selection as Labour's candidate for granted. Having campaigned for Ken, I was sad to see him lose, but I've been sadder to see his inability to let go and move on. Hanging around your old place of work can't be good for anyone. Surely there's a friendly job centre that can take him in hand and help him look at his job options. How can he go to a job interview if he doesn't know his job options?
Actually, it does get me thinking. What do you do once you've been at the top of the tree? It can't be easy. There's a great line in Season 2 of the West Wing, when Jed Bartlett comments to Leo McGarry that being President of the United States is the last job he'll ever have. It makes me worry for people who climb the career ladder too early, who peak too soon. If it's hard enough for Ken to walk away at an age when most people are retiring, how hard can it be to be faced with walking away 20 years before. Where do you go and what do you do?
I suppose you can always reinvent yourself as the star of TV reality show. Now here's an interesting idea - Sralan gets City Hall and Ken gets the boardroom with Nick and Margaret. Now that's a show I would watch.
Well, that's peculiar. I was sure that track I liked was the Dresden Dolls. Now I've synced with iTunes and checked, it seems I was mistaken. I still don't like Elton John though.
Clare Short reading the New Statesman on the Northern Line from Kennington to Clapham North and carrying a nice red jacket. Glad to see in our egalitarian age that nobody offered her a seat.
Honestly, it's like party conference on the tube sometimes...
This week's Marketing Week reports that Pot Noodle will give consumer the change to duel with dwarves.
The activity, which also includes sampling, will launch at the Southend Airshow this month and will run throughout the summer... The Gladiator-style duels between consumers and dwarves on giant Pot Noodle containers will last 30 seconds. Consumers will be e-mailed film footage of their fight immediately after taking to the ring.
Recounting this story to friends yesterday prompted a random outpouring of dwarf-related entertainment stories. The oddest was from the recent Internet World, where an exhibitor had a dwarf painted blue in a cage on his stand. The blue dwarf apparently rattled the bars of his cage in the morning, and in the afternoon was running around handing out leaflets. It was something to do with document management apparently. If only document management were so exciting. Still, what with casino advertising featuring dwarves too, it seems dwarves are the new black. I can't help but feel a little uneasy that it's a very postmodern freak show, perhaps even dwarf-sploitation.
I spent some time this afternoon rewriting the disclaimer information at the bottom of page three of the magazine I edit. It's that bit of the magazine that nobody really reads, but I decided to give it my all. Then had a slurp of coffee. Giggled to myself. And finally finished. It's not a masterpiece.
Several thoughts on disclaimers. Firstly, writing words to the effect that the views expressed in the magazine do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation does not change the reality that, for most of our readership, the views in the magazine are exactly the views of the organisation. Some people will inevitably take every word on page 12 seriously, even quotation from the mouth of an entirely independent commentator, and entirely ignore my little disclaimer. Much as I might like to absolve myself of some corporate responsibility in my editorial decisions, my readers won't give me the same latitude.
Secondly, it's hard to be funny. On the basis that few people would be committed enough to read them, I rewrote them with a humorous tone to reward them for their effort. Now I'm away from my computer and on the train home, I'm not sure I pulled it off. In any case, the world is overflowing with smug sounding marketers who want to make their widgets sound like Innocent smoothies, and I'm not sure I want to be one of them.
Finally, it's very easy to give too much attention to things that don't matter. The disclaimers, exactly as they were, were absolutely fine. I'll probably change them back tomorrow. So there's a little portion of my life I can never get back, wasted on something of no consequence. If nobody's going to notice, it can just be OK. And I could have left the office 20 minutes earlier.
DISCLAIMER: Please note that the views in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of Andy Jaeger.
I "worked" from home today. I say "worked" not worked because in reality my output has been somewhat limited. I think this comes with the territory though. I've never honestly known anyone come in from a day working at home with a completed version of War and Peace on their memory stick.
It does however present a bit of a problem. The organisation I work for is adopting New Ways of Working. In summary, I won't have a desk any more and I'll be expected to work, not "work", from home more often. The desk bit is fine with me. I only occupy it for 50% of my working hours anyway so sharing it with one or more people is entirely sensible. But I'm rubbish at working, rather than "working", at home. Being a social person, and doing an essentially social job, means that I've normally gone slightly loopy by the end of my day if I'm by myself. It's not good. I do not play well without others.
I'm off out for a beer, or perhaps several beers, with a friend now. I'll hug him very enthusiastically and I'm sure he'll think it's a reflection on him. In truth, I'm starved of human contact. I must never become a hermit.
I've just seen the tube alcohol ban poster for the first time at Oxford Circus. To be honest, it looks a bit half-arsed. I completely understand though. If I was the creative working on it, I'd be less than enthusiastic. Especially given that a report earlier in the week claimed that 41 percent of creatives and media types had turned up to work drunk at some point in their careers. How can you do that if you can't drink during rush hour? Well, after rush hour. Being in before 10 seriously stiffles creativity. Being sober is even worse.
That said, the logo for the mayor of London seems to have changed. I always rather liked the fact that the "on" at the end of "London" was red, in contrast to the blue. In the alcohol ban poster, it's not. Given that there's red elsewhere in the poster, not using a two colour version won't be a matter of limiting printing costs, so there are two possible explanations. Either the designer, in a particularly half-arsed way, chose the single colour version because he or she couldn't be bothered. Or something's changed. It would be a very subtle way of signalling it, but changing the logo would show that Boris Johnson is true blue. Unfortunately for him, it also shows that he's not switched "on". I wonder if he ever was.
I suppose I'll just have to leave that can of Carling unopened in my bag from 1 June onwards. Who knows, keeping it there might just stop me mugging an old lady on the way home or breaking a window or two. That at least is what Boris Johnson is hoping.
Banning people from drinking alcohol on the tube and everywhere else on public transport is a headline grabbing measure, but it's somewhat pointless. If drunk people commit crime on the tube, it's not because they're drinking, but because they're drunk. This might just sound like semantics, but it's important. In the length of an average tube journey, most people couldn't, through drinking the alcohol they decided to carry with them, get drunk enough to become violent or become inclined to commit crime. Those tiny number of people who do commit crime are a problem because when they enter the tube, they're already drunk. The only real way to stop drunk people causing trouble on the tube would be to stop drunk people getting on the tube in the first place. I'm not sure breath testing would be popular at Leicester Square at 11.30 on a Friday night, but it would leave a lot of people stranded in central London.
I'm also sceptical about Johnson having recruited, in yet another advisory appointment, former US police chief Bill Bratton. He'll help with zero tolerance policing and drive out petty crime. While the principle is sound - tolerance of low level crime can lead to greater levels of serious crime - in this case it's completely misapplied. You see, the last time I checked, drinking alcohol in public wasn't a criminal offence. And while it might be a neat trick to classify it as a crime and solve it all in the same day, it remains a trick. Making drinking on public transport a crime in order to bring in measures to deal with that crime might lull people into a false sense of security that crime is being tackled, but existing crime will not have been dealt with and in reality, nothing will have changed. Except perhaps increasing the already huge administrative burden of the police in documenting offences and taking them away from real issues of security on our public transport network.