Uh… what?

This is one reason we home school.

AT&T offers me a free phone, with some ….

See anything odd about this ad?  This was in a webpage where click responses pay for the music, so communicating the correct information is important.  Did the person who created this ad simply:

  • lack a dictionary?
  • feel lazy that day?
  • have no idea what a spell checker is?
  • NOT EVEN CARE!!

Then there is the “AT&T as Evil Empire” interpretation– the key word is so badly mangled that the eye simply doesn’t see it, and the clueless victim falls into the trap (of two years with one of the worst customer service outfits I’ve ever seen).

Sheesh..

3 Replies to “Uh… what?”

  1. um….. what?

    It’s really bad grammarily to repeat the word free twice like that, especially since only the FIRST one (and smaller one) is talking about “no charge”, as opposed to the second one (bigger) talking about “no restriction”. And then they abbreviated “year” at the bottom. And there seem to be a lot of hyphens.

    so. help me out. Your star pupil is failing the “I graduated from homeschool test”. what’s the big deal with the add?

    and for the record, you know you just posted a jpg of the add, right? not the whole video?

  2. OK. Maybe I’m weird, or maybe I have been burned by Bellsouth (which still lives in the belly of the AT&T beast) so many times that I just assume they are trying to stab me in the body parts.

    Can you pronounce this word?

    restrictrictions

    The Evil Empire idea must be right- your eye didn’t even see it…

    The video! Aarugh!! I don’t want to SELL you on AT&T. Actually, your comment reveals hapless marketing ineptitude on an even deeper level. The first “free” IS talking about cost (and is a lie- you do pay for the handset- it is built into the monthly fee), but the second isn’t talking about “restrictrictions”, but about the ability to use a speakerphone (in the car, we assume). You know this because there is a dash after “hands”, as in “hands-free”.

    I suspect the “geek curse”. That is the fact that we spend a lot of time writing code, where the placement of a single period can change the entire program (and drive you insane trying to find the mistake). Hence, we think other people read the same way we do. We write ads. Other people go “…what?”

    Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert”, has a special artistic ability to reveal this tension in all it’s wretched glory.

Leave a Reply