For the last week my life has been very similar. Get home, put the kids to bed, make tea, get forced to watch I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Now, strangely when compared with other programmes of this ilk (I would rather be garotted by a rabid Venezuelan monk than watch Big Brother) I do find I’m A Celebrity bearable.
If you can get past the fact that there’s very few celebrities – My Career’s Flagging, Get Me Out Of Here would be more accurate – the sheer sarcastic humour of Ant & Dec and the horrendous trials they had to endure just to earn the chance to eat a fried crocodile’s foot make for tolerable TV. Note I said tolerable. Not good.
What made the 2013 series even more tolerable was the appearance of Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Here’s a guy who epitomises the phrase one-hit wonder – but what a hit. And here is is, a slighty fatter parody of himself, still trading off the Carlton dance. Has he done any acting since The Fresh Prince? Who knows…
Last night’s trial involved a Miss Something-or-Other (Miss Universe? Miss England? Miss Calculated?) wading through some sort of angry festering swamp in return for some dodgy food. Rather like visiting a well-known burger establishment. And sometimes I feel I am in that angry putrid swamp, albeit less scantily clad.
The swamp in my case is my inbox. For every email I want to read, there is two or three I don’t. Spam emails from people purporting to have lost their passport and being currently holed up a hotel in Malaysia in fear of their life – when I know the person at question is at home, having never left Shropshire. Emails from Nigerian tribal chiefs offering me a share of $456 billion, emails from Russian oligarchs, the IRS, Barclays, emails from Chinese companies trying to sell food additives….. I could go on.
But recently there’s been a massive rise in one particular type of email. One my spam filters never seem to pick up and which is driving me insane. SEO. Google. Websites. Companies offering services web design, pay-per-click, search engine optimisation – and they are invariably from India, or Vietnam.
I must point out at this point, I have absolutely nothing against either of these two countries. In fact I’d love to visit them both and hopefully will one day. But why, why why would I ever consider handing over such a crucial part of the business to a company on the other side of the world who has emailed me out of the blue and can’t even write it in English. They want to do my SEO, and yet can’t even type an email to me of 200 words of less in correct English?
Who in their right mind is going to take them up on this? Who is sat there thinking ‚I know, instead of researching and finding a local SEO company, where I can talk face to face and make sure they have a clear grasp of my needs and what the company does. No, I’ve got a better idea, I am going to employ the first person from the Indian subcontinent who emails me out of the blue, regardless of their grasp of the English language, because they say they are excellent‘.
Seriously, stop it. Stop it. Don’t send the first email, and certainly don’t send a second a few days later because ‚you’ve not heard back‘. Yes, there is a reason why you’ve not heard.
MARK LINGARD, MARKETING
