Sunday 25 March 2012

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Confectionery Corporation

Copywriting imitates art:

"Share and Enjoy" is, of course, the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.

The motto stands - or rather stood - in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax - "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the underground offices of many talented young complaints executives - now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.

At these times of special celebration a choir of over two million robots sing the company song "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately - again - another of the computing errors for which the company is justly famous means that the robot's voices are exactly a flattened fifth out of tune and the result sounds something like this, only slightly worse....
I don't know whether the implications of recycling the motto of a fictional company famed throughout the galaxy for the poor quality of its products were lost on Galaxy Mars' copywriters:
... The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is the primary manufacturer and supplier of androids, robots and autonomic assistants for the known universe. They are known for their catchy jingles and catchphrases, supplied by their Marketing Department. They are not, however, known for the quality of their products
The Hitchhiker's Travel Guide describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:
 "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which conveniently fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:
"A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."


The chocolates, I'm happy to report, didn't malfunction in any way.

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