Month: August 2007

Beauty in everyday things

You know the standard desktop picture that comes with Windows XP? The rolling green hillside and blue cloud-streaked sky? I happen to love the thing. The scene reminds me of a farm in Oregon’s Applegate Valley where I spent some happy times (the picture was actually shot in Sonoma County, California).

That's blissWhat’s nice is the harmony—a visual harmony between the angle of the clouds and the roll of the hill, but also a harmony between man and nature. It’s obvious that this is a domesticated setting—the green hillside has been mown, and there are traces of a road at its base—but the human touch enhances the setting, rather than blighting it.

Here’s something I also love: the statement in the ads for satellite TV companies that you need “a clear view of the southern sky” to get service. How poetic—who wouldn’t want that?

And what makes these two examples even nicer for me is that there’s no particular intent to sell you anything or to “be” poetic. Like a shaker chair or a Korean pojagi (cloth used to wrap gifts), they’re everyday things that rise to the level of art.

The Fedex rant

Here’s a first. Yesterday I needed to pay a Fedex bill and had lost the original invoice. I had the second sheet with the backup detail but there was no mailing address on it. Their return envelope just has a clear window for the address to show through, and unlike most remittance envelopes it was not preprinted with the bar code for the ZIP code, so that was no help.

So I went on fedex.com and tried “contact us” and searched for “mailing address” and “pay bill by mail”. No luck. So I called the 800 number, pushed 0 for an operator, told her I’d lost the address and needed it to pay the bill. She says “I’ll get that for you” and puts me on hold—for 5 minutes! By now I’ve done a search on Google and found a mailing address so I hang up.

How many layers of incompetence are at work here? The invoice printing people, the envelope printing department, the web folks, the telephone staff… not one had seen fit to solve a problem that must come up many times each day. It’s their money, folks, I wanted to send it to them!

Ask your payables department about Fedex and they’ll probably have a story like this. Every customer does. Good thing they’re better at shipping packages than at managing their own customer accounts.

Measure twice. Cut once.

I’ve been doing a lot of carpentry this summer, and I find myself pleased by the unforgiving nature of working with a saw. Once you make a cut you can’t take it back. Master carpenters who do the same thing over and over again develop an instinctive eye and a steady hand for sure, accurate cuts. But a tinkering hobbyist doesn’t get enough practice, so mistakes are going to happen. And it’s a milestone in the tyro’s journey when you decide you will toss away the maimed piece (perhaps an expensive piece of stock you’ve worked on for several hours) and start over rather than live with your mistake.

Copywriting used to be something like this, early in my career. I was too early for computers but too late to have access to a steno pool where my manuscript would be retyped. A copy deck was expected to look good as well as read well when submitted—no typos, strikeovers or white-out permitted. And there were moments, many of them, when you’d take the page out of your typewriter, read it over, and realized you should have used a different word or sentence order. And you’d have the choice of living with something that possibly could have been better—or typing the whole page over again.

There’s no doubt computers make for better copy. Not only can you delete your mistakes, you can try all kinds of what-ifs without penalty before hitting the “print” button. But I miss the finality…the recognition that once you type a word, there’s no going back without paying a price. In fact, that may have been what separated a good junior copywriter from a hack—the willingness to not only learn from your mistakes, but pay for them in extra time at the keyboard.