Friday, April 27, 2007

Gonna Wash That Business Right Out Of My Hair?

I just used the "Contact Us" form on the Clairol Herbal Essence website to send the following message:

"This is the third time I've tried to contact you, and I have not received any reply so far. I have no idea whether this is because your webmasters are idiots, or whether your customer service department is being deliberately rude, or merely grossly incompetent. Either way, if I don't have a satisfactory reply in one week I am going to post on my blog -- which is fairly well-read here at the university -- an extremely nasty, cutting review of your company, particularly your web site *and* your customer service. I am also going to send a snailmail letter to your corporate HQ, explaining *why* I have done this, and why you are losing me as a customer."

Basically, I used to use Clairol Herbal Essence clarifying shampoo, because I'm a pretty sweaty guy. Recently, Clairol completely changed their shampoo names, and they set up a page for people to try to figure out what shampoo to use now. That's fine, except they ask all sorts of offensive, flaming-stereotype questions that I don't even understand. For example, here's the first one:

"My friends say I'm:
A. the girl next door.
B. far from perfect.
C. a diva, baby."

Guess what, Clairol: I'm a guy, and you're practicing discrimination. I think this may be grounds for a lawsuit.

Here's another one:

"I'm more likely to:
A. gossip with my friends than about them.
B. sing in the elevator than the shower.
C. I'll never tell."

I'm a fortysomething-year-old guy from Brooklyn. I could guess, or ask some of my colleagues in Queer Studies here at FAU, but why should I have to jump through hoops in order to buy something from someone who presumably wants to sell it?

So, it looks like, after fifteen years, I'm switching from Clairol to Equate or Suave, who don't try to get cute at their customers' expense.

At Large

1. How did Quinones win as a Republican in a heavily Democratic
district? We need to figure out what he did so we can emulate
it whenever possible.

2. It's ironic that the Voting Rights Act, a law generally supported
by liberals, was used to elect a Republican. "Those who live by
the /s/w/o/r/d/ State shall die by it."

3. The unfairness wasn't that the elections were countywide,
but that they were "winner take all." If the elections had
used Proportional Representation of some sort, then a group
with 38% of the voters would get 38% representation (on average).