Tuesday, September 1, 2009

And a giant "OY VEY" lights up on the scoreboard.



I haven't been trained on it yet and no nothing about it other than it's a
workflow-system designed to make client comments, creative reviews and approvals easier. I'm told it's called "Mobius," and I am not amused.

Now I've always understood in my non-geometry-loving-way that a Mobius strip is an endless circle around which you can walk, endlessly, without ever crossing an edge. The key word here of course is endless.

Perhaps I'm naive. But I've always reckoned that the goal of doing work was to have some end or conclusion. Even Heracles' 12-Labors, herculean as they were, were meant to be completed. Here it seems the goal--at least according to its name--of this system is to keep work flowing. Oh, friends, work is not like a river, though my soul has grown deep like one.

--
I suspect that names like Mobius come to the fore because people don't know what they originally meant. In some agencies at which I've been freelancing it seems everyone listens to music on "Pandora." Pandora, the mythological Greek, had a lot going for her, I'll admit. For one, she was seductive as all get out. But the most salient feature of Pandora was her box, which by opening she released into the world all woes--illness, sadness, pain and death. Great attributes all for an online music service.

5 comments:

jeaves said...

Some car models have a variant on their name from US to here in Canada. I was wondering why Jeep didnt change the name of their Liberty model here. I am sure the word hardly evokes any attitude or political position or general good feeling like it should to my south.

How about "Jeep Immigration...it's almost a free ride"

Deidra Bodkin said...

Damn, George you make me laugh.

george tannenbaum said...

Laughter is good and there's too little of it.

Shanty Mathew said...

I'm afraid Advertising is gradually being turned into a mindless, process-driven insult-to-commonsense.

I guess it's to do with the paranoid distrust by the MBA-herd of anything remotely intuitive.

Their 'logic' being: If you can't represent it as a flowchart on PowerPoint, how do you explain it to the witless twit sitting across the table at a client meeting?

Graham Strong said...

@jeaves - Yeah, don't forget the Jeep Patriot. I think that one misses the mark even more.

Then there are the ones that have spelling mistakes on them like the Dodge "Caliber" or the Mitsubishi "Endeavor". For a 20-cent piece of plastic, fix it already!

Kind of funny when cars like the Honda Accord are more Canadian than the US models.

(BTW, does that Accord come in the Special Meech Lake Edition...?)

~Graham