I don't know how long eBay keeps its expired auction listings up, so please go read the full description of this item listing while you have a chance. Go on. Read it. Do yourself a favor and read the questions and answers too. I'll wait here.
This guy is brilliant. By taking a little extra time and being just a little risky, he probably had his leather pants passed around to thousands of email readers looking for a good chuckle (metaphorically speaking, of course). Some of them may have even been inspired to bid.
I wonder why we take ourselves so seriously sometimes, and what we might achieve if we lightened up. And I'm not just talking about testing a really funny and edgy banner ad somewhere. I'm talking about a policy of being smart alecky, sarcastic, witty and eccentric, as opposed to being dignified and professional and, well, just like everybody else.
It doesn't have to be an in-your-face thing either. An example: my colleague David, the smartest developer in the known universe, was using the Aptitude Package Manager for Debian Linux yesterday and accidentally hit a command that would have removed all core files. Like any good program should, Aptitude immediately spat back a warning designed to verify that you really want to do something that might be irrevocably bad. However, instead of going the standard route of "Are you sure you want to do this," the program returned something along the lines of the following:
"Deleting these files is an exceptionally bad idea. Enter 'Yes, I realize this is a bad idea and want to do it anyway' to continue."
And by the way, you literally had to type that whole string to continue.
David, being the smartest developer in the known universe, knew very well that he didn't want to delete these files, and the cleverness of the warning message had nothing to do with his decision matrix. However, because that warning message made him laugh out loud, he is far more likely to pay attention to ALL warning messages when they pop-up in this application.
Maybe humor doesn't work everywhere. I know, some products are by their very nature serious things and arguably not conducive to irreverence (good luck with that "clever" marketing campaign for prosthetic limbs, for example). I also understand that most people aren't funny and that painful, failed attempts to be funny might indeed be worse than not attempting to be funny at all (The "is this thing on?" paradigm).
But still, going back to that guy on eBay, I couldn't help but notice that his feedback was 100% positive. And I'm sure that he will be listed as a "Favorite Seller" by gobs of people who read his listing, so that they can be the first people to read his next offerings and pass it around to their friends. Not a bad place to be if you sell stuff.
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