Following on from this weekend’s activities. I’ve been thinking about what a great bunch of things Jason set me to do. All could be done with little investment, they were all quite fun, and thankfully all legal.
Asi seemed to suggest that I was lucky – and I think he was right. If he’d been in charge I’d have been:
deer-hunting, try nude modeling, kidnap a kitten, learn ballet, minor shop lifting, etc…
A totally different, and much harder, set of challenges.
Anyway, here’s the first few things that popped into my head:
Go into a pub you’ve never been into before and order a drink you’ve never tried before.
Paint one wall of your house a totally new colour.
Go to a record store and buy a CD you’ve always thought you should have heard but haven’t. Then go home and listen to it. Properly.
Buy an ingredient from a ‘specialty supermarket’ and make something with it.
Gamble £5 at a local arcade.
Go to a class in something you’ve never done before at a local leisure facility (this may be more scary for some of us than for others).
Like I said before I’d love people to add to this list in the comments so we can compile a bunch of interesting things to do when the computers are off.
It also got me thinking that this is quite similar to a show that’s been on the BBC (radio and TV) called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. Where they take famous people and get them to do stuff they’ve never done before.
For example:
Comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor buys his first pornographic magazine, tries some unusual seafood and listens to his first hip hop record.
Magician Paul Daniels reads feminist literature for the first time, learns how to swim, and experiences the film The Great Escape.
Stand-up comedian Arthur Smith watches Top Gear for the first time, eats his first Pop tart and watches Les Misérables.
All good inspiration for the start of this list of things.
I had a fun weekend this weekend. Thanks to a number of things.
1. Weekends are good anyway.
2. The weather was pretty nice.
3. I did normal stuff with Sophie like have nice lunches. Laze around. Drink a bit of wine. Get some chores done. Etc.
But in addition this weekend was a bit more exciting because of something that happened on Twitter on Friday night.
I was trying to decide whether to spend the weekend catching up on emails and that kind of thing. Or whether to go the other way and sod it all, so I posted:
To which Jason replied:
And Andy provoked me with:
Which is pretty much the same as a double-dare, and being the child I am I thought. I’ll show them guys. I’ll go offline and I’ll do them things. Then Andy will have to respect me, and not just for a bit. For the rest of eternity!
And you’ll never guess what. It was fun to do a bunch of freaky things. And it wasn’t just the act of doing the things. It’s was the other stuff around doing them that was interesting. Like having to go and acquire knitting needles and wool. Or spending time in the heavy dairy section of the supermarket.
So here’s what happened…
I started out with a shopping list.
Task One – Learn to Knit.
Acquire wool and needles first. I went to the Open Market in Brighton which is quite a place. I think it deserves it’s own post so watch out for that.
Here’s the wool stall.
And as you might have noticed on my shopping list I also needed knitting instruction. Which I got like this.
Absolutely brilliant! I’d have never had a knitting lesson off a geezer if it hadn’t been for Jason’s challenge. Although, to be honest, I did have to cheat a bit later on and look up a couple of how-to videos on the internet. The bloke’s instructions were too fast for me.
And here’s me with my sorry-raggedy-ass knitting.
It’s too tight. There’s dropped stitches and all sorts. But fact is I’d learned how to cast-on and to knit (a bit). So in my book that’s task one passed.
Needles and wool cost about £2.50 and it was quite fun after I’d got past the initial frustration. I reckon I should have got bigger needles and bigger / sturdier wool to make it easier. Would I do it again? Maybe.
Task 2 – Make Your Own Butter
Then I went shopping for some cream so I could make butter. And here’s what happened when I got home and tried to make it.
But you know what, after that minor fuss it tastes pretty good. And it didn’t work out to be stupidly expensive either. I made loads of butter out of 2 medium cartons of double cream. I might even do that again one day. I’m guessing you could do flavours and all sorts :-)
The home made butter turns up again during the Cheese Eating Task.
Task 3 – Make a Weapon
Simple. A throwing device made out of various sized screws and foil.
It may not look much. But during this photo:
It rolled off my hand and onto my bare foot. It hurt. Therefore it works as a weapon. Task 3 – complete.
Task 4 – Make a Fort
I quite enjoyed this. I think if I’d been making it with more of a purpose it would have ended up better. To be honest as a 30-something guy making a fort on your own is a bit of a sad and lonely thing so I just wanted to get it out of the way really.
Here it is.
The close up perhaps disguises the overall lameness of the fort:
But it’s a fort. And I made it. So Task 4 is technically complete.
Task 5 – Eat Cheese
Both simple and fun.
Here’s the cheese board.
Here’s cheese + chutneys + home made butter.
Here’s me eating some cheese.
Task 5. Smashed it!
Task 6 – Paint a self-portrait
Here’s the one task where I may have technically ‘failed’ but I think it would be a tough judge who failed me because of choice of media, especially under the circumstances.
Here’s my excuse. I didn’t want to get out loads of paints and make a mess because we were trying to tidy up the house at the same time. So I decided to do a self-portrait in charcoal.
If you think this is a cop out on my behalf you are very much wrong. Art was my lowest GCSE subject and I’ve never been good at drawing or painting so even trying to do any kind of self-portrait was a big ordeal.
And here it is:
Here it is next to me:
So, self-portrait done. The rules didn’t say it had to be good.
UPDATE: Shit, Missed the poem writing thing!
Task 7 – Write a Poem
Arse. When proof reading this post I realised that there was ‘write a poem’ snuck in the middle of the Tweet. Oh well here goes…
Writing poems is never easy,
Specially when I feel this cheesy,
I enjoyed my time making a fort,
A little more than perhaps I ought,
Making butter was a lot of fun,
But my weapon wasn’t quite a gun,
I suprised myself by learning to knit,
And home-made butter didn’t taste that bad,
I’m afraid my portrait weren’t in paint,
But it’s clear an artist, that I ain’t.
It might not scan quite right, but it’s late and it’s an emergency last-minute poem.
Anyway like I said it was fun. I learned a few things and it snapped me out of a few bad / lazy weekend habits. Like spending it doing pseudo-work on the internets.
So next time your not sure what you’re going to do at the weekend why not get some friends to give you a bunch of stupid things for you to do. You might enjoy it. And you might earn their eternal respect. Right Mr Whitlock ;-)
I’ve been a bit of a sceptic about interactivity and FMCGs. Most of the time they just create digital litter.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a big fan of crisps. But Walkers seem to be doing some peculiarly interesting things around conversations and their brands.
Firstly the brilliant ‘Do Us a Flavour’ campaign. (If you’ve not seen it, they’re getting people to submit new flavors of potato chips. If you submit the winning flavour you get £50k and a 1% share of the profits from the new flavour).
The site’s got a lot of shortcomings. It doesn’t handle duplicates at all well, and the searching isn’t up to scratch. But it obviously doesn’t matter that much to people: 130,000 pages of entries – 6 to a page – gives almost 800,000 flavours submitted. That’s bloody incredible.
But they deserve it. They’ve built the campaign around a great question. A superb conversation starter. I’ve ended up two or three times now in conversations where people have got really excited about coming up with interesting new and bizarre flavours of crisps. And debating what would actually sell. What’s likely to win. Etc. etc. etc.
It’s a brilliant user generated content idea becuase anyone can do it. You don’t have to have any technical skills whatsoever. It’s just about imagining something. And something that almost all of us will have an opinion on whether we’ve thought about it before or not.
Once the submissions round is over. They’re going to manufacture the judges favourite top 6 flavours and let the public choose which of them wins. Generating trial / sales and driving even more conversations. As a genuinely integrated campaign I think it’s quite brilliant.
And now they’ve re-launched Monster Munch crisps. But they’ve not made a new version. Instead they’ve reverted to the old one.
What’s so clever about this is that they’ve tapped into a conversation that’s been going on for decades amongst crisp fanciers. Everyone knows that the old Monster Munch were bigger. They were ‘the biggest snack pennies can buy’. And they had really cool big monsters advertising them. It’s the kind of thing that pops up in those terrible ’50 reasons why things aren’t as good as they used to be’ nostalgiawank TV shows.
Anyway they’ve made them like they used to be again. And I love the ‘old’ flash on the top corner of the pack.
And if you’re wondering how big they are now. This is how big…
Apparently there’s a new website coming soon too. I’m not holding out a lot of hope for it being the next brilliant thing online. If they follow the normal FMCG template it’ll be all about the monsters. Maybe some flims? Perhaps embeddable / sendable monsters? Monster games? I hope they do something really nice though. Building on what they’ve done so far.
And just in case you don’t remember the original Monster Munch monsters from the TV ads…
By Michael Beiruit (in conversation with Peter Merholz):
It’s a dirty secret that much of what we admire in the design world is a byproduct not of “strategy” but of common sense, taste and luck. Some clients are too unnerved by ambiguity to accept this, and create garganuan superstructures of bullshit to provide a sense of security.
I’d never considered of PowerPoint as being a tool used by the architects and builders of ‘superstructures of bullshit’ before.
If you’ve just arrived here from AdBusters you might also be interested in what I got up to this weekend – I did still use the Internet a little bit – but it’s primarily a bunch of offline stuff that I did started by an online thing… Might be useful if you’re thinking of turning off any time soon…
As some of you will know I took part in Adbusters’ Mental Detox Week last week. This meant I stopped doing screen and computer based stuff as much as possible. I was at work so there were obviously times when I had to check email and things. But I did manage to cut it right down to a bare minimum. Outside of work it was a total no computer, no TV, no iPod existence for me. Which is quite a big thing in my ordinary daily life.
A lot of people made comments about it being just like having a holiday. But I’m not sure it’s the same. On holiday your context is totally different and you’re not surrounded by other people who are doing interesting things with their bits of technology. Also I had to resist massive temptation in my pocket in the form of an iPhone.
I think I learned a few things. Most of them were obvious. A few of them were things that I could have guessed if I’d thought about it. But there were a few genuine surprises in there too. There’s even a few things that I might try and build into my behaviour going forward. Imagine that.
In no particular order with no prejudice towards the obvious or the interesting.
I’ve been scared of the telephone for a while. I feel more confident writing things down in emails. It gives me a chance to formulate my thoughts and arguments a little better. Phones always smack of having to think ‘in real time’ which gives me the fear.
But you know what. Phones are good. You can get things agreed in one conversation. Conversations on the phone can be finished in just minutes! The conversation goes back and forth really quickly and you can get to decisions much faster. Plus you don’t have to deal with any tyrannical cc’ing.
I’m going to keep using the phone for things and stop being scared of it.
Lots of people advocate only checking your email a few times a day. I’ve always thought it sounded like an OK principle. But I’ve become one of those people who hits ‘send and receive’ as often as is humanly possible. Just in case something amazing has arrived in the 38 seconds since I last had a peek. I’ve just realised if I did the same thing with real mail. I’d look like some kind of freakish obsessive-compulsive post lover.
Not much happens in your inbox in a few hours. A load of email might get dropped in there. But most of it’s nonsense and you don’t need to do anything with it anyway.
The other thing I realised is that by not sending lots of emails, you don’t get as many coming in. I realised that my email itch gets scratched by sending stuff as well as checking. I was trying to think of a handy analogy. The best I can come up with is that I’m trying to drink my way out of a sinking ship. But then having to wee on the deck.
Aaaaah. The iPod. My sweet sweet iPod. Insulating me against the noise and chaos of life.
On the train in the morning without an iPod all you can hear is the bloody overspill from other people’s iPods. if you don’t have headphones on you have to endure ‘Holding out for a hero’ blaring out of someone’s leaky headphones from 3 rows away. It’s like some kind of MP3 based arms race. Where defence and attack have become all muddled up.
I’ve always been considerate with my iPod volume. And now I’m doubly so. Also having some time not insulated from the sounds around you is good. Obviously.
I found that doing stuff with pens and paper was really different. It made me think about things in a different way. I’m sure lots of people have written lots of smart things about this. But there’s something really odd that I noticed.
Pen on paper felt like a step on a journey rather than the final ‘thing’. Which is really odd. The fact that something that’s made up of real stuff like ink and paper. Only really feels like a finished thought when it’s converted into bits and bytes and pixels on a screen. The electronic stuff is far less permanent, but somehow it feels more so.
What I learned: switch between computers and pens and papers to make your brain work differently on problems.
Without screens and their flickery content I went to bed and sleep when I was tired (which was about 10pm most nights). When you’re reading a book you notice when you get tired. You start re-reading lines and your eyes feel heavy.
With TV or computer screens I don’t get that so much. There’s something about the light and the flickering that keeps me awake. Or in the case of TV I can fall asleep in front of it in a different way. Sort of drifting in and out of sleep and being vaguely conscious that something is going on.
But perhaps the oddest thing was that I had very very vivid dreams for the first 3 nights. Really vivid and intense. I’m not certain there’s a scientific explanation. But I do remember reading something in a WhiteDot book about how TV can change your brain activity. And I wonder if the fact that my brain wasn’t processing hours of made-up junk but was instead still processing real-life things made me have bold dreams.
This was one of the most profound things for me. Hard to explain to other people though.
The web allows you to fractalise everything. I read a few different books. But instead of doing what I’d normally do and keep leaving the book to go and look something up. I made little notes and just kept on reading.
Normally I’d go and look something up and then find myself drawn into a world of related links and other stuff that looks interesting. Effectively leading me into some kind of infinite worm-hole of stuff. Most of which ends up being completely unrelated to where I started from.
Last week I finished books. Then I had a list of things to look-up. In a much more ordered fashion.
Computers do not help me focus. They help me find lots of other nice things. Or give me infinite distractions. Making sure I have the perfect soundtrack to the work I’m doing. Or changing the typeface in a document so it looks nicer while I’m typing it. Should I be viewing it at 125% or fit to page width. All stuff to fiddle with.
And there’s no end to any of it. Ever.
I thought that I might feel disconnected from people. But I didn’t.
I was still in contact with people. In fact oddly sometimes more connected by using the phone. And I think we’re all used to the fact that we can have gaps in speaking to people and when we go back to them they’ll still be OK with us.
But what happens when you leave ‘stuff’ for a while? Mostly it’ll still be there. But sometimes it won’t. I think mainly the fear was just that there would be too much stuff when I came back to it. I knew that I’d have to just ditch loads of unread RSS feeds. Which effectively meant that I’d missed out on all those things.
I just had to realise that it was OK to miss out on all that stuff. My life didn’t change in a bad way. Really. Or did it? Now I’m not sure. Maybe there was a blog post or a something that could have changed my life irreversibly.
The point is that there’s too much stuff and I have to learn to let it go. There’s stuff going on everywhere the whole time. Most of it I’ll never get to see. Even if it was all on the internet and all being fed into my brain I wouldn’t be able to cope.
I learned it’s OK to miss stuff.
I’m a victim of computers being at the centre of our lives.
Photos, music, writing, etc. It felt like almost all of the tools that I use to be creative had been taken away. I was going to go in the loft and play with vinyl records and stuff, then I realised that all of that stuff gets piped through my computer in order to record.
I learned that I should develop some analogue creative habits. Just in case the power goes out ;-)
I noticed that it’s easy to hide behind a computer. Shut down the laptop and you feel incredibly exposed in an open plan office. Aside from the people whose tools are entirely computer based (coders and designers) I noticed that a lot of the project managers, strategists, etc. seem to do the same as me. Computer on. Looks like you’re working. But if you actually look at peoples screens most of the time they’re doing things that look very much like other stuff.
Of course all the other stuff is important. But the computer is an amazing smoke-screen. As long as you’re typing away you look busy and like you’re doing something important.
Here’s my final thought:
Taking a week off seemed like a silly, reactionary thing to do. Like I was just proving a point. But I think the most important thing was to realise how easy it is to just reach for the laptop and get sucked into a different world. So setting some hard and fast rules was really useful. Rather than just saying, “oh I’ll use it a bit less” – which is almost impossible. The thing that’ll work for me is to set periods of time where it’s just not allowed.
So that’s it. I’m glad I did it. But I’m glad I’ve got all my toys back too.
Iris are putting on an interesting event next week in London. It’s totally free so go and sign up if you like the look of it.
It’s called Under the Influence and it’s 20 talks spread around 5 pubs in Borough Market. Each one has a different theme. I’m in the boozer talking about ‘immersive experiences’ and that jazz. There’s a greeny one, a ranty one and one about content and stuff (at least I think that’s what it’s about)
My talk is provisionally entitled: “The Use of Magic in Countering Human Adaptive Tendencies“. I wanted to make it sound really pretentious and grand. But it’s just another talk about the blinking internet and the stuff I know some stuff about. I’ve just bought a magic kit though, so you never know what I might be able to do by next week…
I’m a bit nervous being as the talks are in pubs and everyone’s allowed to drink all day. And I’m at the end of the day. So I’m guessing heckling might be more of a hazard than normal… ;-)
Some top speakers spread throughout the day. Hope to see some friendly faces there :-)
[I’ve written this post once already. I got to the end of it just as someone phoned me up. I picked up the phone. Fumbled it. And dropped it on my laptop which duly crashed in a spectacular fashion. The second revision is slightly shorter and hopefully more to the point…]
I watched a great documentary on BBC4 on Sunday called The Rise and Fall of the Ad Man. Presented by Peter York it featured a lot of the great ‘ad men’ of the past, and some of the present. There were loads of interesting points worth noting. But I’ve forgotten most of them now (for the next few days you can still catch the whole thing on BBC iPlayer).
The thing that stuck with me mainly was its celebration of the glory days of advertising and specifically the rise of the hot creative shops of the 60s. CDP (Collett Dickenson Pearce) was the poster child of the show and it’s success seemed to be attributed to a few things:
The time was right. The swinging 60s. Post-war gloom moving into a period of rapid cultural innovation.
The existence of a bunch of TV natives. People who had grown up with TV, who knew how to write for it, and to make it work for them.
A media environment where you could create a phenomenon overnight by putting something on the only commercial TV channel and hitting 20m people in one go.
Clients needed help.
The creation of a place where cool creative people just wanted to hang out.
[Forgive me if any of this is woefully incorrect I wasn’t alive at the time and I’m basing all of this on something I saw on the Telly, which is never a good place to start]
Is ‘now’ the time right for something new?
It feels a bit like the time is right for some kind of big shift again. And judging by the fact that there’s about 5 new agencies starting every week it would appear that others do too. Most of these new shops are claiming to be some kind of new new thing.
But if you’re coming out of an agency, trying to hire people who work in other agencies (media, digital, design, whatever), the danger is that you’re going to end up with just another variant of an agency. Sure, it might have better laptops, the structure may have mutated and the working culture might be tweaked slightly. But most of these new agencies seem to be built on well understood principles with well understood types of people working for them. This might give you a temporary moment of interestingness and competitive advantage. But it’ll only take a minor manoeuvre for someone else to catch up.
So assuming that the time is right (and it might not be), what would you do to create a brand new agency, like what they did in the 60s?
Hire Digital Natives?
I’m making the assumption here that digital natives are to today what TV natives were to the 60s.
So hire some digital natives. People like me who think that digital is ‘a thing’ are old-school. We might be able to help get you through the next few years, but unless we become less in awe of a bunch of computery things we could end up making ourselves obsolete.
But right here, right now, I think we’ve got our Hovis opportunity (Hovis make bread, they also got a seminal Ridley Scott ad during the 70s). There’s still a moment when we can do the big huge magical thing before all this digital stuff just becomes ordinary, everyday and expected.
I’ll get back to the hiring thing in a bit.
The Media Environment
Once you’ve got people you’ll need to create a guiding principle that celebrated the media environment that we’re dealing with. Embrace fragmentation and change. Realise that big lumpy unpredictable niches are about as good as its going to get. Or that narrow:deep audiences can become wide:deep audiences very quickly and with tiny media costs.
I’m not sure exactly what that principle is, but it’s the equivalent of knowing that a break in Coronation Street is your playground – then making the right stuff. (Hell if I knew the answer to this I’d be a very valuable and important man).
I loved this from the programme:
I doubt that this would be said by many people nowadays (especially not in the online space).
Clients Needing Help
The show documented the huge improvements that have been made to the marketing function within client organisations. Leading to a suggestion that in lots of places the marketing function is so sophisticated that they’re constantly butting heads with the agency – I can’t believe this could be true ;-).
In the ‘glory days’ it seemed like the agencies who were producing great work were almost unquestionable.
If you’re trying to launch a killer agency right now. Where do you think clients need most help? Where can you command a position of unquestioned god-like genius? On my list marketing and advertising wouldn’t be at the top.
Creating the Place
And now for the big one: creating the place where the cool guys come to hang out and do whatever it is they do.
I don’t think this is about environment it’s about a culture of possibilities and the other people they’re going to have as company/inspiration. And paying people properly – if you want to attract the best people you’re going to have to shell out. As someone in the BBC4 show quoted, CDP knew that if they paid peanuts they’d get monkeys.
In the 60s it was the best artists, writers, film-makers and suchlike who were the people you wanted in your gang. But who are the people you’d want nowadays? Here’s my list:
Entrepreneurs: You’ll be wanting the new Sergey and Larry. Of course. We all would. It’s about finding the people who just want to get stuff done quickly. People that make things happen. And who have a passion for things that they’re making / selling. There’s a big difference between business people and entrepreneurs. At least in my humble experience.
Geeks / Inventors / Designers: I’ll probably get shot for bunching these people together. But for these purposes I am putting them together. It’s the people who conceive of brilliant things. The ones who invent the widget. Or the new way of making something more usable, or more beautiful, or work faster or better. But specifically it’s about finding the ones who don’t have self-imposed limits. The ones who believe that anything is possible.
Super producers: Oh yeah. The people who know how to get things done. The people with the address book you’d kill for. Give them a thing to make or a bridge to build and they’ll know the people to make it happen. And have them on team in a couple of days. I think there’s about 26 of these people in the world (at last count).
Online content creators: People who make things. People who can’t help making things. The ones who are just be out there making videos, or music, or poems, or doodles. People who understand how to create a moment. A piece of online cultural history.
Cyber anthropologists: I didn’t really know what to call these people. They’re the people who have an ungodly fascination with what’s going on ‘out there’ the ones who are living real online lives, and watching and interrogating other people too. So they wouldn’t just be commenting on online dating, they’d be out there getting hooked up. And I’d be particularly looking for the ones who are trying to understand what it all means from a psychological and sociological point of view.
Uber bloggers: Of course I’m just sucking up to bloggers here so that they all link to this post and say nice things ;-) But seriously if you’re a certain type of blogger you know certain types of things that not many other people do. You understand how content and conversation work together. You understand how things get transmitted around the blogosphere. In short you understand some very important things about today’s media landscape.
As I went through this list I sort of sense checked it by seeing if I could put names next to all of these roles. And I could. So they’re not fantasy people. They really do exist.
Then once you’ve got a great place to work and assembled that rag-tag bunch of mistfits you’ll need some hardcore project managers and business people to be able to sell the shit out of the nonsense they’ll come up with.
I forgot. It might be expensive. And it might not work. But if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be worth bothering.
Anything or anyone else you’d chuck in for good measure?
I seem to be witnessing more and more intellectual pissing competitions these days. And it’s not just in planner-land, although that’s where I’ve witnessed some of the ‘best’ ones. I’ve seen a few good technical ones, and even designers seem to be getting in on the act.
So how do you spot when the transition between conversation/discussion and pissing match occurs? Typically the conversation will start to move from being a group thing to being dominated by 2/3 members of the group. These people will become the players.
One the players have been established they take it in turns to metaphorically piss higher up the wall than each other. Most of the games I’ve witnessed have been about rather esoteric matters. I guess there’s no fun in facts.
Pissing competition tips:
As a player you might get be having fun. And it’s fine to play with friends in private. But in public it’s not a great thing to be seen doing. It makes you look like a tit.
If you accidentally get drawn into a match, make your best shot fast and early. If you don’t slay the opposition with your first or second go, realise that they’re involved in a war of attrition and retire to a safe distance to minimise splashback.
Games can span multiple meetings – sometimes you’ll have to endure the same players spraying again and again. If possible try to move their ‘game’ into their own separate environment.
Ultimately everyone ends up covered in urine (even innocent bystanders).
Or maybe I’m imagining it all.
Anyone else got any thoughts on Intellectual Pissings? (If I ever make an album I think I might call it Intellectual Pissings, I quite like it).
Image from Geoff (not sure what the etiquette is about using images from Picassa pubic galleries – hope he doesn’t mind).
I just got a nice mail from the people I mentioned (or rather didn’t mention) below. It went a bit like this:
With head hung suitably ashamed, a very valid response to my earlier request – you’re right, blogger relations is certainly an area in need of vast improvement and I think the education starts here. So many thanks.
We’ve done a couple of mails back and forth and we’re now best friends.
See the internet is great isn’t it? You can have like conversations and feedback and stuff. In real time.
I wonder how that might change O2s policy on not supporting Apple Macs.
I had a very odd conversation with someone in O2 customer support the other day where they told me that they didn’t support Macs. Apparently, according to the lady I was speaking with, they only support Hewlett Packards. Which I thought was strangely cute.
So I actually wrote a letter (like on real paper!) to O2 pointing out that this might not be a clever thing if they’re going to be stocking the iPhone. But sure enough I got a reply back saying that they don’t ‘fully’ support Macs
The letter was nice…
But in my experience the actual support people simply said, “no we don’t support macs” and that was the end of it.
It would seem a little odd to be making lots of noise about working with Apple and the iPhone, yet at the same time not supporting their products in the same way they support PCs…
If you want to see the full contents of their letter…
