Last Wednesday I woke up to find that my shiny and reliable 12″ Powerbook had suffered something of a heart attack in the night. It was all seized up. It wouldn’t save. It just sat there, staring at me, mocking me, saying “No, Chris, you won’t be getting any work done today after all.”
So I brought it up to the Apple store. The nice guy with the beard there said they’d box it up and send it off for repair. Probably just needed a new Hard Drive, he said. These things happen, he said. Covered by my extended warranty he said.
So I shipped it off and took a forced vacation.
Or half a forced vacation, since the projects keep coming in hard and strong these days. All of a sudden I was a mercenary, hopping from friend’s machine to coffee house trying to get my logon fix. It was horrible, but I figured it would only last a few days and then the love of my computing life would be right back here with me. I could wait. I could handle it.
Then on Friday I got an email. The email said “Yo, Chris. We got your computer, but we gots an issue man. You gotta call us.”
Only not like that at all.
So I called up Apple.
And the nice folks at Apple (they really were very nice) said “Well, it looks to us like the problem has been caused by some sort of impact. There’s a dent. A dent we say. So we aren’t going to cover the repair.”
And I say “OK, sure, well, I don’t remember any dent, but if you say so. But how much will the repair be?”
And they say “Um. A bunch of money.”
So I say “Well, damn, I’m not going to pay a bunch of money to repair a 2.5 year old computer. Send it back.”
So I went up to the Apple store again, this time with my credit card clutched firmly in my hand and I dropped an even bigger amount of money on a shiny new macbook pro. It’s shiny. It’s new. I love it. I really didn’t want to have to buy it.
But anyway, I get my shiny new Macbook Pro home, I plug it into my backup Hard drive, I hit the restore button, I go get a drink of OJ and then I come back to find out that my restore has failed; that my backup is corrupted, and that all that data that I really, really do need, well, it just ain’t here.
And then I had a nervous breakdown.
And then I called my really mac savvy friends who helped me salvage at least a few recent and really important files.
And then I continued my nervous breakdown.
My old computer should be getting back here today. As soon as I get it, I’ll be searching for someone to help me scrape the data off its platter and get it back to me. I’m about 90 percent sure I’ll get everything back, but who knows how much it’s going to cost me.
Whew. It’s been exhausting. But I’m back to work. And hopefully it’s all going to be fine.
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OK, I’m biased. I’ve been a hardcore mac user for a few years now and just the idea of going back to the UI Siberia that is Windows sends shivers up and down my spine.
Not that I don’t like the big M. I’ve worked for it in the past, I have an Xbox 360 sitting in my living room and I do the vast majority of my work in MS Word (OK, that last bit is more by necessity than choice. If I had a better option that had the Word track changes feature I’d probably jump on it.)
What really bothers about marvelous and monolithic Microsoft is just how massively mediocre most of their marketing is.
I mean, when you’ve got budgets like I know they have and smart, smart people like I know they hire, you’d think you could come up with better work than, well, this.
So, yea. Doesn’t exactly start you salivating, does it? Doesn’t exactly get you ready to cue up at Best Buy for when this long-delayed update finally drops like a bomb on the sky-gazing, fearful world.
How many man hours and millions went into developing the yawn-inducing tag line: “Bringing Clarity to your world”? How many dozens of drafts did that home page copy go through before it limped broken and beaten onto the Vista homepage?
It’s . . . OK, embarrassing is probably the wrong word. But it’s certainly boring. And it’s got the stink of engineers and middle managers and ambitious ladder-climbers who “just want to put their mark on something” and weary, weary creatives who have gotten so used to having their work ripped up and reorganized that they just gave up.
The worst part? With this limp, lazy, no-risk-taking, no-promise-making site, Windows is setting the tone that all of their partners and hangers-on and immitators are going to imitate for years and years to come.
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Last night Dominic Canterbury and I did an encore presentation of our “Top Ten Marketing Mistakes made by Small Businesses and What to do about them” class. We had a great turn out (in fact we were technically overbooked) and managed to cram quite a bit into one long two hour stretch. Dan McComb has posted some comments and pictures (goofy pictures, in my opinion) on the Biznik Blog. Chem it out.
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Some of the best modern fiction today is being co-opted by spammers. My regular dose of “C i a l i s” and “v1agro” spam came in this morning, but at the bottom of the frame one of them had this:
“you, Mr. Bourne. And care for you.
Jason looked at her in the shadows, grateful for the darkness; she
could not clearly see his eyes. Then be reasonable and use your head,
he said coldly, suddenly feeling so old, too old for such a
transparently false lack of feeling. We know Carlos is in Moscow and
Krupkin isnt far behind him. Dimitris flying us there in the morning, ”
Which is, of course, from one of the “Bourne Identity” books. You see? Spammers aren’t evil. They’re spreading good literature to the world!
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Am I the only one having a terribly hard time focusing on work (or on blogging) the last few days? It’s gorgeous out here. Terribly gorgeous. The type of gorgeous that ruins economies. Even now, typing this little tiny post and getting ready to go teach a Biznik class, my eyes keep drifting off toward the window. I want to go to the park. I want to play frisbee.
I wonder if anyone’s ever done studies on worker productivity and sunshine. Are sunnier places less productive than the dark and dreary? Or do the dark and dreary places see a giant drop in productivity when the sun comes out while shiny places like LA stay about the same all year long?
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Hey, guys.
HWW #15 has been posted to the archive. Go dig in. It’s a good one.
http://haddadink.com/newsletter/2006-04-01/
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Hey, guys
HWW #15 has just been sent out to the clamoring masses.
It’s a good one. It features a funny/embarrassing story about me. What more can you ask for? What, I say?
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This is sort of a behind the music post–a look into the world of a hardworking copywriter and the decisions I have to face most days of the week.
Possibly this is a little more than I should let on in a public forum, but heck, what’s a blog for if not for getting yourself in trouble?
Here we go:
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The customer is always right . . . except when he isn’t.
This morning I got comments back on a project I’m doing for a tech company.
And the comments came back in the form of the big red document of doom.
Now, having worked for tech companies in the past (I’m in Seattle, so the big M is nearby), the big red document of doom is no stranger to me.
What, you may ask, is the big red document of doom?
It’s when a client goes nuts with MS word’s track changes feature and rewrites massive amounts of copy.
Which is fine. I’ve seen it before, and I find the best thing to do when a client feels to need to go all Big red on me is to let them do it, read what they do, and then figure out what they actually mean on my own so I can do my second draft.
But the real issue here is that the client wants to go in a direction that is the fundamental opposite of what they should be doing and that rubs all my copywriting instincts the wrong way.
The client:
-Is uncomfortable using “I” and “you” in the copy or talking directly to the reader.
-Wants to use “Stronger” language like “initiate” and “solutions” (personally, I think 5 dollar words like that are weaker, not stronger.)
-Wants to have “edge” while maintaining “professionalism” and “following industry standards.”
Which, when put up next to what they said they wanted before I got to work on the project, really all comes down to them not really knowing what they want.
Now, it’s a B2B company. I’ve written a fair share of B2B in the past, and in my experience the B2B copy that works is the B2B copy that realizes that even high powered CEOs are just people like you and me. Yes, you respect them, yes you talk about their “business needs” but no, you shouldn’t use the same old meaningless jargon everybody else does just because you want to sound “professional.”
So here’s my big challenge:
How do I give my client good, hard-working copy, when my client thinks that bad copy is good and that good copy is bad? How do I do what I do best–help them make money–when they’re asking me to write like a generic also ran?
Do I give them what they want or do I fight for what they need?
I’d love to hear your comments.
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Thanks to web dev badass Daniel Talsky for pointing out This article for me.
I haven’t dug through the decisive flow folks blog in the past, but I think they hit a core concept of modern branding right and swift on the head. That being that honesty and inclusiveness are a lot more powerful today–and especially online–than hype and dazzle. Building a small business today is about establishing a good mix of old fashioned feet on the street marketing and new fashioned relalationship building.
Anyway, check out the article.
Posted from: The Victrola Coffee Shop
While listening to: That song that says “She fell in love with the drummer” over and over again.
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Hey, folks.
Sorry for the radio silence there. I was buried to my nose in work and theatre stuff and then got hit by the cold to end all colds. 30 or so hours of sleep later and more ibuprofen than I can count and I’m back to my normal writer-monkey self.
I’ve also been busily posting on the Biznik Blog so if you just can’t wait for that Haddonic goodness, shoot on over there.
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