HUMOUR

Ndumiso Ngcobo has gin — but no tonic

Picture it. It’s 19h29 on a random Wednesday evening. Tyres screeching, you pull up in front of your local liquor store. Your eyes are bloodshot. Your nerves are frayed and there’s a bulgy vein zigzagging across your forehead. It’s been that kind of day.

It has taken all of your strength not to fetch your sawn-off Uzi submachine gun from the boot and go postal on your colleagues at the office, especially Wicus, that anal-retentive prick from Finance who has refused to honour your travel claims for two months, mostly because he can. Your free will has been corroded by your stress- induced abuse of alcohol for the past 10 years. And so all you need on this Wednesday evening is a few doubles of gin and tonic to calm your jangled nerves.

Bottle of gin — check. Two 1-litre bottles of tonic water — check. You get home, mumble half-hearted questions about what kind of day everyone has had — just enough to keep your hopes of that Mom/Dad of the Year nomination alive — and then you pour yourself a generous double.

Ah! You take that first sip. That’s when your 10 000 taste buds rise up like an army of English football hooligans, yelling bloodcurdling obscenities at you. “This doesn’t taste right, yer effing &^%$!,” they scream. And the realisation hits you: you bought soda water instead of tonic water. Aaaargghh!!!

In most fast-moving consumer goods companies, changes to packaging are initiated by the folks from the marketing department. For the uninitiated, the marketing department exists for the purpose of finding out what consumers want, at what price, and making it happen.

In the corporate world, this generally means that marketers are at the top of the pile. They speak more loudly than everyone, wear fancier outfits at work than anyone else and what they say almost always goes.

Also, they get all the tickets to watch the Springboks in the company box at Loftus. And the fancy Bafana jerseys.

Marketers are especially obsessed with packaging.

I cannot count the number of times I sat in product development meetings listening to marketers saying things like, “We can’t have a green swoosh on the label because green is the colour of jealousy. What we want is a purple splash because purple is the colour of sensuality.” This always screwed with my mind because I was raised Catholic and priests wear a lot of purple. As for green, it just makes me hungry because spinach, green peas and cabbage, you know?

Back to where we started. I have between six and seven Schweppes

Soda Water 1-litre bottles in my cupboard. Every single one was purchased erroneously by someone meaning to buy tonic water. I’m responsible for three of those.

This is because someone in the marketing department decided to change the labels — and the new soda water label has the same yellow as the new tonic water.

Confronted with this social injustice, I did what all human rights activists do: I posted about it on Facebook. As it turns out, practically everyone has made the same mistake.

In the event that an exuberant Schweppes brand manager thinks I’m picking on them, they’re not the only ones. Anyone with children has experienced this. Your child wanders into the study where you’re trying to read Stephen Hawking’s My Brief

History. He’s in a state of acute frustration because he can’t unwrap his Fizzpop. The folks at Fizzpop are clearly unaware that the target market for lollipops is children, so they wind them up so tightly that by the time you’ve managed to open it for the kid, your face is contorted and you’re on one knee.

It’s not just edible products. Removing a pair of pliers from that futuristic hard plastic casing requires a pair of heavy-duty toothed scissors. To get the scissors out of their packaging requires a hammer. But to get the hammer out of its packaging, you’ll need the pliers. When was the last time you tried to remove that cling wrap plastic around a CD case? It’s nearly impossible.

A friend says he once struggled so much to open a box of Durex condoms in the heat of the moment that he laid into it with his incisors and canines. The long and short of it is that at some point, the object of his passion tapped him on his back and whispered, “Babe, the ‘clingwrap stuck to your upper lip’ look is not working for me.”

A friend struggled so much to open a box of condoms that he laid into it with his incisors and canines