Walmartian chronicles

A friend of mine sent me an email with photos of Wal-Mart shoppers, which got me started on a quest for the tasteless and the tacky. Because right now I’m in need of a laugh at someone else’s expense, for a change.

This is what I found. And also this.

I feel a little bit better.

A question of beauty

We live in a strange, strange world, when such icons of drop-dead beauty as Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington aren’t “pretty enough” for the cosmetics company they represent in advertising. No, the photos for L’Oréal’s campaigns for Lancôme (Roberts) and Mabelline (Turlington) apparently required air-brushing and Photoshopping to “perfect” the women’s faces.

I know this because Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency (and isn’t that a concept all on its lonesome?) has banned the adverts in question at the behest of an MP for precisely that reason.

Now, here’s the thing: the products being advertised were foundations—you know, the stuff women are supposed to glop onto their faces to even out skin tone and provide the backdrop for the rest of the crap they’re supposed to apply, like blush, eye shadow and whatnot. (Look, I had a traumatic experience with greasepaint as a child; I’ve never liked gunk on my face since.) 

I.e., the agency geniuses not only thought that Roberts’ and Turlington’s mugs needed a boost; but also that Roberts and Turlington wearing L’Oréal’s products needed work.

Think about that.

If the Pretty Woman herself and a supermodel aren’t “beautiful” enough to be presented without digital alteration, what the hell kind of standards of beauty are we supposed to be held to?

And what the hell hope do ordinary women have of getting within the same time zone as those standards?

Oh, and BTW—who the hell is setting those standards?

More of our tax dollars not at work

Here’s an interesting chart, out of the NY Times by way of The Atlantic, regarding the fine mess we’re currently in.

Not that anyone in Congress cares, because they’re too busy posturing, spouting rhetoric and playing chicken with the nation’s future.

Actually, I don’t believe any Congressmoron has a clue about the concept of “future”, since for them long-term means “the next election”.

Scroll down to the bottom of the story for a chart depicting the effects of Shrub’s tax cuts on the fine mess we’re in.

It's enough to make a donkey weep.

All aboard for Milwaukee

The product management group I’m part of had its weekly “team” meeting yesterday morning. (And why are corporations so keen to use the word “team” when what they actually mean is “a bunch of people working for their own advancement, at cross purposes and without communicating with each other”?)

And one of the group, a part-time PM who’s evidently also part of the engineering group in Bangalore, informed the rest of us—including our manager—that a portion of the software operates in a particular fashion entirely unanticipated by us. Meaning, the developers decided to build the interfaces in this precise way, even though this is not how it was specified in the product requirements document. Meaning also that yesterday, three weeks before the entire highly-complex software-hardware-services product solution is supposed to be ready for what they call “first customer ship”, product management discovered this functionality for the first time.

For those of you unfamiliar with the world of product development (especially software products), this is like the Pullman porters deciding to steer a moving train to Milwaukee instead of Chicago, and bugger the whole concept following the actual rails.

But, as if that’s not whacked enough, our manager did not go ballistic. That’s like the train’s engineer just sitting back and filing his fingernails; maybe thinking about bratwurst, instead of throwing on the brakes and opening up a can of whup-ass on those porters.

The thing that worries me a lot is this: I’m responsible for collecting and prioritizing the feature requests, as well as writing the PRD, for the next couple of versions of this product. & not only do I feel as though I’m still going to be chasing a runaway train that’s already pulling out of the station—even though these people will have gone through two releases by mid-August and; should thus know better—I have no confidence at all in my manager’s capacity or will to grab the damned controls and be a bloody product manager.

Aside from which, we all look like groupers, flapping our mouths open and shut at meetings, discovering that the product we were supposed to have conceived, specified and driven is actually going to Milwaukee.