Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

Here's The Creepy Imaginary Pizza You Didn't Order

Ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi has come up with a sticker that, when attached to the peephole in an apartment door, makes it look like there's a pizza guy outside. The product is the first release from Saatchi's "Scaring Agoraphobics Silly Lab," and, honestly, the mockup frightens even me. Maybe it's the imperturbable look in the pizza guy's cold, dead eyes; the caretaker in "The Shining" unnerved me less. Maybe it's the fact that Papa John's famously features something called "Cheesesticks," which are served with marinara sauce; don't look now, but that's a side of pizza you just ordered with your pizza. Or maybe it's that I don't want even the square inch of optical glass that sits between me and the outside world (well, that and a steel-reinforced door, a sophisticated security system and a cunning array of booby traps) colonized by Madison Avenue. And where does it end? What's to stop some prankster from coming up with a sticker featuring Rita Cosby, Sharon Stone, or one of my lawyers? Because baby, if that happens I'm coming out shooting.

And We'll Split the Strawberry Parfait in a Craftsman Tool Chest

Mr. Irresponsible was forced to spend some time in San Diego, CA this weekend, a town that experienced travel writers have dubbed "Paterson with hills." While there I heard about a mid-priced seafood restaurant called "Rockin' Baja Lobster," a name that so clearly bears the stamp of overzealous focus-group testing that the place might as well have been called "This Restaurant Was Named By a Focus Group." The trademark of Rockin' Baja Lobster -- well, besides the apostrophe that says "This Baja lobster's fun, it's now, it's got zazz, baby!" -- is, and I am not making this up, a selection of seafood entrees that are served in buckets. Yes, buckets. Like you mix paint in. I don't know precisely how the gimmick is effected, because I was too busy rubbing my eyes in disbelief; I mean, do they ceremoniously bear the bucket to your table and dump the contents in your lap, or do they give you a small hand shovel and instruct you to dig for your supper or what?

This may be overbranding at its silliest, which is saying something. At that, though, the people-pleasing folks behind Rockin' Baja Lobster (whom I imagine to be a faceless multinational with ties to the Saudis and a name like "EvilCo LLC") are only riding the latest wave in food service, which is to deliver you your entrees in something approximating the shape of Oddjob's hat. Denny's has just started promoting an appalling variety of bowl-based offerings (you can see them here, but don't say you weren't warned -- the Ham & Swiss Bowl looks like something your puppy did), and KFC has been all over the NBA playoffs promoting a glutinous construction of mashed potatoes, corn, fried chicken bits, gravy and cheese, served in -- yes! say it with me! -- a bowl. As far as Mr. Irresponsible can see, this is one more bit of proof that America's laziness is reaching near-pandemic levels. When did eating food off plates become too much trouble? Did somebody say "You know, using a knife and fork to push my food together into a series of mouth-sized portions... darn it, it's too much work! If only there were some sort of conveyance in which my food would just sort of slide together by gravity"? Have we all lost our minds? Or are we just too shiftless to live?

Either way, I know what my next move is. I'm having all my food served to me on plates, beautiful china plates that are as unbendingly flat across the middle as America herself, and that includes soups and coffee. I may end up with lunch in my lap, but I'll still have my pride.

Living The Ways of Being

I never did get to the end of this motivational music video for Starbucks employees, because it seems to be a little under eleven hours long and somewhere in the middle my senses of time and space and proportion started to warp like a Frisbee in the sun. But I listened long enough to draw some conclusions:

1) Some bits of cultural detritus are best left by the roadside, and "We Built This City" is one of them.

2) "Living the ways of being" is terrible, terrible writing, even by the standards of corporate happyspeak.

3) No matter how many gently self-mocking asides a copywriter may include,  embarrassing = embarrassing.

4) You sell coffee, for crying out loud. The employees have been downing free lattes since six o'clock this morning. Do you really want them more peppy? If you want to do your customers a favor, demotivate the staff.

All that aside, this is actually... No, sorry. It's just awful.

Thanks for calling Airhitch, you jerk. How may I direct your pointless call?

The travel site Gridskipper has an absolutely beautiful post today about customer service. I can't do it justice here and won't try, except to say that it includes a transcript of an IM session between a client of air-travel consolidator Airhitch and a customer-service rep. Due diligence requires that I note this: The whole thing could be a fraud. But in the memorable formulation of Newsweek when it was caught out on the Hitler Diaries, "Genuine or not, it almost doesn't matter in the end." What's thrilling about the exchange, and what makes it valuable whether it's real or a prank by some kid with time on his hands, is that it strips away the very, very thin veneer of civility to reveal the true dynamic inherent in customer service: The companies hate us and want us to go away and quit bothering them. They pretend they don't as a last vestige of the corporate best practices that used to be in vogue a hundred years ago; we pretend they don't because we have no choice but to take our sad little problems to them, and it's humiliating. This calculus has never been so richly and thoroughly explicated as it is here. So in the event that "airhitch20" is a real person in the employ of what sounds like one nutty outfit to work for: Sir, thank you. You have eliminated a substantial portion of hypocrisy from the client/company relationship. And in that spirit, let me add this: Go f**k yourself. There. Don't we all feel better now?

Have Yourself an Irresponsible Little Post-Christmas

I've remarked elsewhere on the gauzy, energy-sapping air of unreality that prevails during the extended holiday period. This year-ending torpor, which reaches its peak in the week between Christmas and New Year's, falls particularly hard on office workers, who have to maintain at least the appearance of best business practices during a period when they'd really rather just down the last of the Snowman-shaped chocolates and stumble off to bed. So for new readers dropping in via the Fast Company weblog, a few tips on how to make the best of this sleepy off-week in the office.

1) This is an excellent week to steal office supplies. Efficient office managers, unwilling to lose any budget dollars left unspent in the last few weeks of the year, will have laid in a princely stock of legal pads, pens and those nice rubbery desk blotters. Now go nuts! Fill a pillowcase like St. Nick himself with Swingline staplers and multicolored Post-Its. Don't worry about getting them out past the drowsy security guard, who hates your employer even more than you do. In fact, brighten his day with a broad, larcenous wink as you roll the boss's personal copier out to your car. He'll appreciate the personal greeting, which is more than the boss himself ever gave him.

2) If your company was kind enough to give you a Christmas gift, use the corporate T1 connection to list it for sale on eBay. The lightning-quick upload of your descriptive text will enable you to beat the rush, and is sure to help you secure top dollar for your faux-crystal desk clock or motivational paperweight. (And remember: It is not actually your attitude that determines your altitude. It is much more accurate to say, as my friends at Despair.com do, that "Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.")

3) Finally, take advantage of the relative quiet and isolation to gather dirt on your co-workers. In a nice coincidence, the ones you will most likely want to incriminate -- i.e., those higher up the ladder -- are also the ones who are most likely to be spending the week elsewhere. So look at this week as a chance to redress some of the cruel inequities of office life, like the one that traps you in an airless maze of cubicles while your boss takes his idiot son snowboarding in Vail. Thus emboldened, dig deep. Waste baskets and recycling bins are a rich, loamy source of incriminating data. And when your boss drifts back in sometime after the 3rd and demands to know why he's been summoned to Corporate for a dressing-down, and what the hell happened to his copier, anyway, just smile. And enjoy your Happy New Year, courtesy of Mr. Irresponsible.

Nobody Knows Anything (About Money)

If you've ever wondered why economics is impenetrable to most people, you probably have too much time on your hands. Or you're an economist yourself. Now that I think about it, there may be some overlap between the two. Is it just me, or do economists seem to issue pronouncements more or less quarterly, after which they... well, do what? Head back down to the rec room and play Skittles for 90 days? What's griping me this afternoon, however, isn't how often the economic experts seem to punch in. It's how often they're wrong when they do. Look at this quote from Bloomberg, and tell me how many times you've seen ones just like it in the news:

"My belief is that you've probably got six or nine more months of positive performance on the economy," said Philip Dow, director of equity strategy at RBC Dain Rauscher Corp. in Minneapolis. He expects the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to gain 10 percent in 2005. It has risen 0.6 percent this year. "If you look at economic progress and guideposts like earnings, they have been better than analysts predicted," he said.

In other words, the good news is that the experts were wrong. Huzzah! Smoke 'em if you got 'em, boys! See you in 90 days!

Is there another field in which the batting average of the practitioners is so low, and the excuse for lousy performance so thoroughly institutionalized? As an advice columnist, I'm regularly called to account for poor results. I generally decline to assume responsibility, as I'm a big believer in people, by which I mean other people, assuming personal responsibility for actions. By which I mean their actions. But still, you see my point. The screenwriter William Goldman was talking about show business when he famously observed that "Nobody knows anything." He might just as well have been talking about the Dismal Science, which might just as well have been called Cointossology. (™ applied for, just in case.)

Babble On & Off

Mr. Irresponsible isn't naive. I know that business doesn't really see me as an individual, a living person with cares and sorrows and an itch between the shoulder blades that I just can't reach. Business sees me as a source of raw nourishment, much as the alien invaders saw Earthlings in "War of the Worlds," or as teenagers view their parents. And this is okay with me. For example, I have no beef with the fact that the people who beam TiVo service into my home consider me a unit of data, which exists in part to be aggregated and sold to advertisers. Does this really harm me in any material way? I mean, TiVo and I are a summertime thing. It's not like I carry a spiral notebook on which I've scrawled "Mr. Irresponsible-TiVo" and "Mr. I. TiVo" and "Mr. I. & T 4-ever." And should the day ever come when TiVo has to choose between me and, say, marginally better 4th-quarter pre-tax earnings, well, I know that'll be the day I see the last of TiVo. All I'm saying is, I'm a big boy. I can read the Terms of Service as well as anyone. 

Where business and I do part company is in its use of language. I don't understand why the people who speak for business insist on talking some ghastly hybrid of English and Fortran. Take this piece from today about TiVo's introduction of -- oh hell, who cares what it's the introduction of? Some new subscriber-parsing capability in their software or something. I think it allows users to click a key on their remotes and get instant access to product information. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to do it. You're not going to do it. Is there really anybody sitting home watching a time-shifted episode of "Six Feet Under" who actually thinks, "Say, I would like to be sent product information on the new Hypodermicon 6000 TransDermal Pudding Delivery System from ConGlomCo! Honey, hand me the remote!" No, of course not. What matters is the way TiVo's Level-4 PRbots describe their new gewgaw:

"We have seen the need to provide greater entry point to this advertising space ... to support enough advertisers concurrently," said Kimber Sterling, director of advertising and research sales.... "Advertising is a substantial growth area," Sterling said. "It is not a material revenue for us yet relative to our overall revenue picture."

Why do the people in press releases always talk like they've been struck by lightning? Is it some sort of badge of insidership, like a secret decoder ring? The English language, and by that I mean the off-the-rack version spoken by you and me and everybody we know, or at least by anybody you'd want to hang out with, was good enough for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur Miller and Joseph Mitchell. It ought to be good enough for Kimber Sterling.

The good news here, of course, is that corruption of the language is pretty much the only large-scale corruption that business hasn't managed to pull off. Most people don't talk like PR drones. But Mr. Irresponsible is a purist about some things. I like my bourbon straight up and my English the same way. So the next time some yutz with an MBA and a Blackberry tries to talk to you about synergism, why not do as Mr. Irresponsible does: Smile pleasantly, nod agreeably and throw the switch in your brain that allows you to tune their babble out in favor of something more authentic. Me, I like an endless loop of Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse," which has the side benefit of making the inside of my head sound like a Daffy Duck cartoon. You feel free to go ahead and pick your own, though.