Friday, 6 January 2012

Spelling dedication, or…

Travelling can be so much fun.
I’ll ignore the episode of the selfish gal who’d pulled the window blind down on the train, thus stealing the view for three rows, including, of course, mine (all right, she was sleeping when I arrived, and I let her sleep quietly, but the moment she woke up, the blind went up, up, up).
No… the real fun this time happened when I reached town and took the tube to head home (and, no, the fun wasn’t me manoeuvring suitcase, cat in his cat-bag and my giant handbag-cum-laptop on the stairs!).
I noticed a badvert (my camera was under my laptop, so no photo, sorry!).
Imagine a black background and the photo of a cute blond gal. The ad is for a “TownSingles.com” kind of company, and the text is something like: ‘Guess where I met my neighbour’ (Sorry, I didn’t take a photo or take down notes – no free hand, and a driver eager to reach hell quickly; you know what it’s like).
The ad in itself is just poor, but what’s interesting is that at the first stop I noticed the ad for the first time… because someone had added: ‘Ads make you stupid’ and ‘I met my neighbour when I went to knock on his door. You silly blonde!’
People write on ads. Nothing to write home about a blog entry on the topic… except that the ad is in all the stations on the two-thirds of the line I did travel, sometimes on both tube platforms, and the same person wrote the same text on all of them! If you stop to consider that sometimes one has to wait the next train for five minutes (and it’s simply impossible to write such a long text while travelling on the same train because the stops are way too short), that’s dedication against badvert, or too much time to kill and nothing better to do, or… sheer obsession on the verge of barminess.

Update, four days later:
Oh… since there was a mini-storm in town, I took the tube again. Another line… and guess what?
Yup! Same ad, same addition to the ad (and same handwriting!). I think we can scratch dedication and get in touch with Bethlem Royal Hospital right now…

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