Monday, June 29, 2009

How did i end up in that booth singing that corporate jingle for the chance to win some "vacation certificates"

And then i guess the next question is why did i post it on my facebook page... the whole thing is very disturbing indeed.

Well it all started out with me making like old mother Hubbard looking in the cupboard and seeing nothing tasty there so i packed up the twins (2 years old each) and headed to the large "BOX" store... that i don't feel like naming as it would further give props to another corporation, and seeing that this blogaroo is being powered by the shame of the reality of what happened a few days ago, lets just keep it at that.

So there I was walking into the store with my cart and my bags and one kid on my back and on in front so they can't fight and i see and hear booth for a company that makes products that you might store in your bathroom and they are pulling people out of the parking lot to sing their jingle as part of a "talent search", but clearly the marketing of the plan is through the Internet. You sing the company jingle they post it you get all your friends and relatives to vote you up so you have a chance to win $8000 dollars worth of "vacation certificates" and in the end the company gets a large population of people to hear their jingle and it puts the product in their head.

So as i pass the damn thing i think to myself "what kind of a fucking idiot is going to do that shit" and then i go into the store to by food for the family for the next week with 2 2year old's. Now the kids are fine and we know the routine but perhaps we stayed a little too long... but they were blowing out decadent ice cream deserts at half price so i picked up like 6 boxes...

The line ups at the checkout were long so i had to let the kids down to run around as they were starting to loose it, but as solid Robertson's they were a great help loading the groceries on to the belt... it was at the checkout things began to go fowl. I guess the checkout lady thought that obviously a man couldn't handle 2 kids and bagging his own groceries so a gross incompetent was called in to help me. She got in the way, dropped stuff, got bags filled with the bananas and apples on the bottom, put chocolate on ground beef and it punctured through and she got one bag misplaced on the belt that belonged on the adjacent checkout and then she bumped over Emily and all the while she was complaining to me about how hard life was... i finally sent her away but she had damaged most of my stuff by then and i was suddenly in a very bad mood. So I was leaving mumbling to myself about how that is the stupidest thing i have ever seen when suddenly some crazy guy leaps out at me with a blue tie a white shirt and says "OK YOU GUYS ARE UP YOU READY TO SING THE JINGLE"... i was eyeballed him for a few seconds and then was left with no choice but to scream "OK man we are doing it!". Then a girl came at me with a lyric sheet, so i started trying to back out as anger and comedy impulses faded and sanity started to take over, but then the guy came back... this guy was a good salesman and then i remembered about the six boxes of ice cream treats in the hot parking lot and really at that time my duty to the family was to secure those cold treats into our quality freezer ASAP.... it then occurred to me the quickest route home is through the recording booth.

Do i need a rehearsal, hell no i know this jungle like the back of my hand, and then i looked at the back of my hand and made a face like i had just observed a foreign object... the joke went unrecognized... people were to busy explaining how to use a microphone... and then there was a music stand with like 500 copies of the words, and i said don't worry about it, lets hit it... well in my first take i missed a key product line so we had to do it again, and the kids were having fun so we hit it again and then i started going into a dream sequence about how you could do take after take for hours on end like you might do if you were in a band making "the ultimate" recording with a bunch of "experts" who want to quibble about each syllable.

after 2 takes we had to split but i toyed with the idea of telling him that perhaps if he edited the first part of the second one with the last part of the first one it could be gold... he was a good guy an i was walking away with some great "if this was a reality show" comedy ideas. And then we got those ice creams home and then i washed the ground beef off of the chocolate and the hate came back.

When the company emailed me with my version of the song there was a convenient "post to facebook" button, a good idea for their "get their jungle in every body's head" plan and so i hit it. On the plus side our relatives got to see a video with the twins and CT and I had one hell of a laugh over my representation of the b part of the jingle that perhaps it was worth something.