As Far As I Can Tell

The amount of people that can’t seem to unsubscribe themselves from receiving Moped Owners Directory updates is amazing. For those that don’t know, the Moped Army website will send out an email letting you know about a newly registered moped owner in your area. You define “your area” when you create an account. You can choose people in your zip code, your state, or your entire country. Soon I’ll be changing the zip code choice to be something like “25 miles from you”, which will be more useful than zip code.

Every message that gets sent contains the following instructions:

If you no longer want to receive these messages, or want to change how nearby a person must be before you get a message, please to go http://www.mopedarmy.com/, log in and edit your account to change your preferences.

Even if they didn’t read the whole email, you would at least think that people would go back to where they signed up for something in order to unsubscribe. It’s not like these notifications were turned on by default or anything.

Maybe I need to make a link in the email that when clicked will simply cancel all notifications. Yeah, yeah, that�s the wolf ticket.

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It’s so frustrating working on design projects at work. There are always a million people involved, but I couldn’t tell you what all their roles are. Their titles range far outside of industry norms, ending up sounding somewhere in-between the heyday of the self appointed dot-com titles, and something that sounds like it was created by a new economy phrase generating perl script. Example: Digital Strategist.

The worst part is that the titles don’t seem to actually dictate roles, or expertise. I have everyone from copy writers to producers to random people walking into the meeting giving me advise on minute design decisions that aren’t in the realm of concrete business nor technical concerns, but more like - “Can we make this red?”. Wrap all of their whims under the guise of improving “brand-equity”, and change the straight forward sounding copy to be a muddle of strung together synonyms. End result: blah.

At the end of the day though, aren�t we all happy? Some dude somewhere rakes in major advertising award show entry fee cash while giving an arbitrary award that means little to nothing. Corporation XYZ decides as a committee that indeed, they are happy with what�s been created. Product ABC is now properly marketed to their target age group and demographic, but best of all, that pesky advertising budget has all been spent; whew. And I — well I get paycheck of course, and that�s all that really matters anyway right?

$ell out.