Creativity Gets Ugly

In recent months, I’ve noticed several news releases from The Creative Group. As far as I could tell, they spend their time conducting surveys on a variety of mission-critical business topics like “Off-The-Wall Job-Hunting Tactics” and “Wacky Behavior at Company Events.”

Sample results? “More than half (52 percent) of marketing executives and one-quarter (26 percent) of advertising executives said they view unusual job-hunting tactics, such as sending a potential employer a shoe "to get a foot in the door," as unprofessional.”

Personally, I find that statistic astounding. And I once emailed my resume to a company with a bullet point that read, “Mange the work-flow of two full-time co-op students,” so I know a thing or two about being unprofessional.

Today, The Creative Group took it to a whole new level:

“OFFICE PRANKS FOR APRIL FOOLS' DAY?: They May Be No Joking Matter, Survey Suggests.”

According to the release, “Seven out of 10 (71 percent) marketing executives polled by The Creative Group consider April Fools' jokes unsuitable for the office. The responses were more evenly split among advertising executives, with about half (51 percent) finding workplace pranks appropriate versus 45 percent who gave a thumbs down.”

I find it kind of alarming that more than half of marketing executives can tolerate receiving a shoe in the mail from someone they don’t know, but 71% of them think “whoopee cushions in [yes, in] their coworkers' chair” is “unsuitable.”

Perhaps what’s worse is that on the advertising side, 4% of respondents flat out “don’t know” if jokes are OK in the office.

And these aren’t just any respondents, they’re “senior marketing executives randomly selected from the nation's 2,000 largest companies.”

I happen to think that if these executives can’t decide on a joke, then there’s not much hope they can mange a major business decision.

I'm sorry... and shit.

While at my first job out of college, I closed an e-mail with the sentence "I'm sorry for the inconvenience."

Except I misspelled "inconvenience" and the spell check function automatically changed it to “incontinence.”

I didn't even realize it happened until the email recipient wrote back, "Not to embarrass you, but I think you meant inconvenience, not incontinence. Incontinence is ‘the inability to control excretory functions.’"

To this day, I wish I could think of something that spell check could automatically change to “God, could you possibly get any more annoying?"

But then again there's no need for two people to revert to middle school mentality over a typo.

I wonder what my old coworker would do if she saw "incontinence" splashed around in a news release headline:

New Study Reports That Physical Therapy Treatment Resolves Symptoms of Urinary Incontinence in Women

Um, not to embarass you or anything American Physical Therapy Association, but real ladies don't have symptoms of urinary incontinence. In fact, they don't even pee.