Friday, July 17, 2015

Bleach blechh

If you text, or receive texts, you've seen emojis...the teeny tiny itty bitty cartoon images of kids, cats, houses, cars, slices of pizza...all the things we need to illustrate our colorful lives.  Because even a picture the size of a pea says 1,000 words, we insert them in texts to represent 999 words.

But, just like in the day when I as a kid wondered how come the "flesh" Crayola crayon looked just like my skin and nothing like Jackie Robinson's, someone finally wised up, and added some new faces.  
New emojis represent us all

And before you know it, two things happened. Predictably, the tired chorus of people who wish it were still 1934 whinged about the "need to be politically correct," because they, what?  Hate to be correct about something?  Prefer that huge portions of the world, the country, their state and county, feel left out?

And then, someone doing a job that didn't even exist in 1934 made a big faux pas.   

d'OH!
Someone in the social media department at Clorox bleach decided to get some free publicity by tweeting "New emojis are alright but where's the bleach," which sounded to everyone in the world, except the doof who wrote it, like they were asking that all the new emojis of color become all Donny and Marie in tone again.

It's hard to imagine that in America USA in the year 2015 someone employed in a rather important position by a major company (although, who uses bleach anymore? And why pay extra for the name brand, like the Buy 'N' Save label bleach won't sanitize and de-scent the garbage cans?) could be so obtuse. But, as always, corporate spokespeople rushed in to fill the void:  


"We apologize to the many people who thought our tweet about the new emojis was insensitive," Molly Steinkrauss, a spokeswoman for Clorox, told CNN.
"We did not mean for this to be taken as a specific reference to the diversity emojis—but we should have been more aware of the news around this. The tweet was meant to be light-hearted but it fell flat."


How interesting that people in the bleach business have such tunnel vision that they think the texters of America, indeed the globe, need a bleach-bottle emoji, because how many times have you been writing to someone and the topic turned to bleach?

That many.


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