Trivial Pursuit
18/06/2010

One of the joys of the internet is its quirkiness, the fun of surfing on a sea of trivia and exploring bizarre byways and stranger sites: dancing babies, piano playing cats etc. Not that, ahem, we have much time for such nonsense during working hours you understand – just a little dabble in the lunch hour! Glancing quickly over the shoulders of our staff (before they could click back to pouring over reports and accounts etc) I discovered them diverting themselves with the following:

Our copywriter, predictably, was logged onto the advertising slogan generator at www.thesurrealist.co.uk (I wondered why our copy lines seemed so familiar) in which you insert the name of your client or product (say ‘Bloggs’ or ‘Widget’) and it comes back with ‘Bloggs. The best a man can get’ or ‘A widget a day helps you work, rest and play’ and so on. The fun bit is guessing which company or product they were originally written for (preferably not when they sue you for using their line).

I surprised our senior designer gazing wistfully at www.milliondollarhomepage.com and wishing he had thought of it. Some impoverished student hit on the idea of selling his home page as an on-line billboard to advertisers at $1 a pixel. The result is a mess of typography that looks like nothing so much as a pizza topping, but the punters went for it in a big way and our young entrepreneur ended up a dollar millionaire.  Any offers for our home page?

Our web designer has a readymade excuse for trawling the net all day, and is so totally immersed in it he’s gone so far as to create his own avatar web designer (YouTube: roystonsimpson) who spends his time creating his own avatar web designer, who spends his time … and so on. Personally, I think he should get out more.

Our company accountant I caught looking at her own on-line bank account (well, she would, wouldn’t she?)  She informs me that looking at wacky websites is a totally male thing, and women are much more practical, no-nonsense and down-to-earth.  Strange, because you’d imagine that someone who spent all their time doing accounts would be adept at fantasy games!

And myself? I spend enough time each week handing out business cards at networking events to be beguiled by Hugh McLeod’s www.gapingvoid.com in which he daily pens and presents cartoon business cards to public figures and others he deems worthy for one reason or another. He also writes an agreeably anarchic blog, and is author of the best-selling book ‘Ignore Everybody’, his own cranky guide to success, with dictums like: “All men are created equal. So you might as well go with the one with the cash”.