Tuesday, May 22, 2007

There's a link on the last post to the X Files. One of those shows had a reference to Herb Philbrick. The X Files hero was FBI agent Muldur. In the show, his mother lived on the south coast of Rhode Island. About three miles from where we live, as the herring gull flies.

I know. I know. Ideas of reference. Seeing stuff in fiction you connect to your life. It's not a good sign. I Led Three Lives. An ad executive. The X Files. Connecting that series to what's happening in my neck of the woods...

Crazy? Yeah. But ya gotta admit. It's more interesting than Bob Barker and The Price Is Right.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

In our lifetime we have seen Icon's and Superstars. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and other's of various catigories. The top of list has to go to Bob Barker. We are talking about "America's Santa Claus." The only differnce from him and us is, !!He kept the same job for 50 years.!! Were talking Walter Cronkite types of numbers. As you can see I still believe. Fred

Anonymous said...

You're right, Fred. One job for 50 years or so: Game Show Host. I made some bad career choices, and should never had said " No " when they asked me to fill in for Monty Hall way back when...

Anonymous said...

I'm not a TV watcher, but I'll chime in here anyway with a comment related to an earlier post.
I had to jump out of the chat the other day due to a flu of some kind, but I've been thinking about the design of "systems" that build in a level of assurance that we (the client) will fail and/or be rendered voiceless and give up. This type of design is everywhere, the most blantant being those old record and book clubs whereby you'd get billed until you finally got through to them to cancel. And we know that the difficulty in getting through was no mistake.
I was a sales rep for IBM for about 10 years. One of my customers was Bloomingdale's By Mail, the catalog outfit. I was discussing voice automation systems with the CFO when I realized that the phone number for orders was toll-free but the one for customer service was not. He winked and said something along the lines of "When they have to use their own nickel to report problems, we somehow get fewer problems." Nice.

The other day my husband was doing the nightly junk mail sort, you know, the thing we all do with mail every day.
We're both pretty quick at sorting the junk out. He looked twice though, as the stuff was going into the trash and recognized a return address. One envelope that was DESIGNED to look like junk mail contained a rebate check for a purchase he made six months ago. (Of course the manufacturer was banking on his NOT taking the time to mail in the rebate form, but that's another story.)
Tiny rebate, but still. This one got away, PepBoys!

Anonymous said...

Interesting stuff, Jennifer. I am, indeed, going to whittle my RI Department of Labor and Train Wreck posts down to an 800 word op-ed piece. What you have to say here helps.

And, as I said to you before re the news today that Buddy Cianci, when he gets outa the pen next week, is going to work for a marketing and PR firm.

Talk about perfect fits.