Hello there – how are you?
Miss me?
What a stupid question.
Anyway, I had a fantastic time …
Sure, any holiday is good [well, except my disastrous honeymoon] but this was bloody awesome.
OK, so Forest did their best to ruin it – and they very nearly did – but sadly I’m so used to them disappointing me, that I never allowed myself to get too excited about their Premiership prospects … and while I still went through a period of utter dejection and depression, being with my Mum made everything fantastic..
Now while I’ll be writing a few things about my Mum’s first ever trip to China, I don’t want to lull you into a false sense of security thinking I’ve changed and everything on here will now be nice, interesting and heartfelt so to get you back into the ‘bottom-of-the-barrell’ mood, have a look at this …
Can you tell what it is?
No … it’s not a scene from a horror movie nor a sign from God, it’s the light from one of the new bedside clocks I bought recently.
And guess what, you can’t turn the fucking thing off.
It glows like a lighthouse all bloody night.
OK, to be fair, you can turn it off – because the light represents your iPhone is attached to it – however given this bedside clock has been created to work with the iPhone and has features directly related to having an iPhone, not connecting it kind of defeats the whole fucking point of having one.
Who designed this?
I’ll tell you, either someone who never turned the lights off or a fucking retard.
How hard would it be to incorporate a ‘light off’ button? Seriously …
This thing is supposedly from 29th century, alien technology and they can’t include a button to turn the fucking light off?
Hell, if they’re that lazy, they could have said it had an ‘incorporated night light’ but instead you get a bedside clock that looks like it’s sending a signal into the night sky, asking for Batman to come and help.
The problem with so many things in product development, marketing and advertising is that in our quest to get ahead, we focus on innovation and features rather than incorporating relevance, meaning and feeling – which is why I believe every department needs a person who can look at things objectively, not just supportively.
That doesn’t mean they are the miserable fucks of the office … the people who who kill every idea every day … I’m talking about people who make sure what is being done makes a modicum of sense – like having a bedside clock not have a light that makes sleeping a pain in the fucking arse.
These people shouldn’t just be planners, but planners should certainly be able to add an element of ‘common sense’ to the process because without them, anyone can convince themselves what they’ve come up with is right … only to have their self assured confidence smashed right back in their face when the people in the real World see what you’ve been spending all your time patting yourselves on the back for and telling you its shit.
Innovation is important.
Sometimes innovation is about features.
But to increase the odds that something you do is going to fly … relevance, meaning and feeling should not be optional elements, but mandatory.