I liked this. It’s on the back door of the Oxfam bookshop in Brighton. You kind of get a sense of what’s going to happen if you press the button (not much pretty slowly). Perhaps web interfaces should take a lead out of this kind of honesty.
- Sign up now (ish) – just a few things to choose to not opt-in to first
- Latest News (or sanitised PR gubbins depending on your point of view)
- Contact us (well, not ‘us’ exactly, the ‘us’ who wrote this page are part of a completely different department in megacorp inc, your mail will be sent to some kind of automated processing centre and some real person might see it one day, but only after you’ve replied a number of times to tell us that we’re not actually answering the question you asked in the first place)
- Fun stuff (or actually it’s just ‘stuff’ if we’re being totally honest)
- Loading, please wait (this might take a bit longer than is strictly necessary so we can add some visual tomfoolery, but please wait, we assume you’ve got plenty of time)
I don’t know what’s driving me to become such a cynical digital bitch these days ;-)
My pet hate for this is the over-Innocentised ‘contact us’ copy that’s rife amongst ad agencies. Maps with arrows saying “drop in for a chat”, or copy like “or just come in for a cup of tea”. This clearly isn’t true, as they certainly don’t want a cup of tea with every single person who reads their site, as the many rejected work experience and grad people will testify.
When I was looking on the web for agency jobs, I was planning on dressing up like a gross DVD salesman/tramp, and going round agencies who had this on their website, asking for chats or tea, and then compiling all the results of being turned away into a hilarious blog post. But instead I found a job. I might still do this though.
Hey in fact I just looked, you guys are culprits…! DVD!?!?!