'It's carpet madness at Carpetright this weekend' (other carpet showrooms are available including a delightful feel my pile section at Shagpiles'r'Us)
Seriously, just what type of madness are we talking about here? Do customers arriving through the door get thrown into a world that involves cross dressing goats, baths full of prawns and a chance to beat the life out of a naked employee wearing a pair of small Axminster underpants?
Maybe I'm taking this all wrong, but the adverts sounded so convincing. Probably stretching it a bit to knock a few quid off and call it madness but then again who knows what counts for madness in the murky world of under shoe coverings.
But then again I'm reading everything wrong at the moment. Take this advert, 30% less sugar it proudly announces. I'd take that to be 30% less sugar in the product advertised, wouldn't you? If you read the small print it's actually 30% less than most other full sugared drinks so really they may not have even taken any sugar out at all, just compared it to the most sugary, notice the word 'most' and found a statistic to exploit.
My favourite though is the neat little statistics they throw in, '85% of women agree that their hair felt like real hair after using our products' or '92% of men couldn't tell the difference, 8% couldn't give a toss'. See, statistics, only this time they are pretty meaningless as they are usually followed by 'from a survey of 135 women' or 'we asked 89 men over a three month period', don't you get the impression that most of this is actually made up? Do you know of any reputable survey businesses that use such a low amount of people in a survey? Buying a product on the basis that the number of people that gave it the thumbs up would fit on a bus compared to a population of 63,200,000 is a tad silly. 85% of 135 people is around 114.9 give or take a finger or two, lets say its 115. Take that as a percentage of the population and you have 0.0002%, pretty tiny isn't it?
Many years ago our household was selected for a survey into mental illness, don't ask me how or why and I can see you smirking but we sat there incredulous as the first question was 'are you mentally unstable?' No, but I work at a carpet shop and I'm full of madness at the weekends. Seriously, as an opening question it's a bit blunt, it was followed by questions not designed to give an insight into mental illness but instead carried on in a similar vain with 'Do you feel happy all the time?' and the incredulous 'If you had voices in your head would you attack somebody?', no, if I had voices in my head I'm sure they would tell me to take mental illness seriously and rip up your silly little survey that isn't helping one bit.
If you need any more silliness in 2006 I received a phonecall doing a survey that was looking at the kind of value that creative services generate in our region, try as I might they would not believe I was just an artist working from my dining room they had the impression that I employed thousands so I was feeling a bit rakish when she asked the question 'Just what kind of figures does your company bring into the region?' I replied £175 million. She wrote it down.
'Excuse me, did you just write that down?'
'Yes, it will help with the survey when we generate the final report.'
'Do you check the information your given?'
'That's what I'm doing now, that's why we are phoning people directly rather than sending the survey through the post.'
'But I just lied.'
'Did you, on what, the number of employees?'
And there in lies the problem, in reality I'm a one man band that works in a dining room farting around with brushes but so easily on paper you can become a multinational company with thousands of employees dabbling in multimillion deals skewing the creative industry demographic for the region for years ahead.
It seems madness is not only restricted to carpets.
Oh, and the mental health survey said I was a borderline psychotic schizophrenic bipolar disordered depressive individual with a penchant for statistics and random blog entries. Got that one wrong didn't they!
www.petersmithcollective.co.uk Home Of Foreverbunny and the Impossimals
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