Views from the Dusty Aviary

So, I had to stop for petrol the other morning. As I’m dutifully holding the nozzle at low speed (to minimize fumes and maximize liquid throughput), I note an addition to the pump.

They’ve put in TELEVISION screens on top of the pump. Like I need to be inundated with more television the 5 minutes I’m there getting gas. But whatever.

As you can imagine, it was mostly ads. But interspersed were a weather forecast, traffic report, and some news items. One news item particularly caught my eye. It seems that airports are looking to different technology to screen passengers and their carry-on luggage. According to the news report, they’re going to use electromagnetic waves instead of radiation to search for bad objects.

(if you don’t get the absurdity of this, please go here.)

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Speaking of commercials and gas pumps, though, I saw a new ad (to me, and it’s not on youtube yet, sorry). It was for the Saturn hybrid SUV. Very clever ad, for the most part. It starts out saying how we all like to indulge – showing people in a Sam’s Club type place; a kid putting too much ketchup on his burger; a person who bought a flat screen tv bigger than his wall. Then it shows someone filling up her SUV at the pump and looking miserable. The camera pans to a couple in a hybrid Saturn Vue looking at that poor, suffering woman with a smile. Then, the voice-over talks about how the Vue gives you good gas mileage and the size vehicle you want.

It’s a brilliant commercial, until the closing line, which was something like this: “Instead of super-sizing, try super-right-sizing.”

I don’t know about most of you, but to me, and to most who have been tinged with the auto industry, right-sizing is the latest fancy word for downsizing which was the 5-minutes-ago word for layoffs. You’d think a GM company would be more sensitive than that.

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Speaking of right-sized companies :), for those who have been following the saga, my days at Spaceley’s are finally finitely numbered. I’ve been offered a job in my new profession of choice and will be saying sayonara 12/15. I’ve managed to reclaim some sanity recently, not that I had much to begin with. But bitterness is completely gone. And after going through the right sizing we had (we cut our workforce, but not our work load, and definitely not our upper management, in half), that’s saying something.

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In other news, it seems that Philadelphia has started a feud with Baltimore over who gets Poe’s body (or what’s left of it). It’s getting dirty. I never knew Baltimore was the syphilis capital of the world!

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