Why Men are Necessary and More News From Nowhere by Richard Glover

Author:Richard Glover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Damaged relations

The bill at the pub is printed with the words ‘the damage’. I have a sinking feeling. Oh, no, say it isn’t so. They are trying to be hip. They are trying to be my pal. They are trying to be so many things they are not.

They are a hotel owned by some faceless capitalist corporation. Probably Woolworths. Can’t they have the decency to present a bill printed with the words ‘the bill’?

It’s part of the rise of that fresh horror: the try-hard corporation, otherwise known as cornball capitalism.

Later, I’m using the internet, which I access through a web browser called Mozilla Firefox. But today the system is having problems and it flashes me a message. It says: ‘Well, this is embarrassing, we’re having trouble restoring your tabs.’

I don’t want Mozilla to pretend to be a contrite human being, red of face and damp of brow. It is an internet browser. Why has it come over all chatty and apologetic?

Later still, I visit Twitter, which is also having problems. It flashes up a cartoon of a steamship proceeding through choppy water, with the words ‘We’re pushing the ship as hard as we can, captain’.

Well, perhaps if they all spent less time writing perky apologies, they’d have less need for them in the first place.

Is it too much to expect faceless capitalist corporations to behave like faceless capitalist corporations, instead of pretending that they are some street-savvy sixteen-year-old with his pants halfway down his arse and a savage disregard for social norms?

Consider this sad attempt at hipsterism from the Coca-Cola Company, surely one of the world’s least hip organisations. Some time back, it produced a new energy drink called Mother, with the following warning on the can:

‘Warning! High caffeine content. OK, we know that’s why you’re drinking it but our lame legal guys made us warn you not to feed this to kids, up-the-duff women or the weak who just can’t tolerate it.’

Up-the-duff women!

Lame legal guys!

The weak!

Look up the term ‘try-hard loser’ and surely there’s a hyperlink to this, the world’s most glorious example of the genre. Really, you’d have to be seven years old to be fooled by it.

Maybe the rush of energy and good feeling promised by this particular fizzy drink is merely the effect of the mocking laughter with which customers greet the work of the marketing department. There’s something about the phrase ‘up-the-duff women’ which instantly conjures the image of a balding and dandruffy Coca-Cola marketing executive, dressed in a pair of stained Fletcher Jones pants, dowdily searching the internet for ‘young people’s lingo, please’.

Serve him right if he gets the reply, ‘Sorry, captain, but the ship is now under water.’

There’s now so much of this stuff, a visit to the shops feels like a trip to a Dad Joke convention. The Nudie fruit juice company sells bottles of juice featuring cute messages from the cows and the carrots which supposedly provide the ingredients.

Stuff like: ‘The carrots want to know why the oranges can call themselves oranges when they (the orange-coloured carrots) have to call themselves carrots.

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