Saturday, May 27, 2006

Tale of Greed and Avarice

Ben & Jerry's is introducing a new product called "The Cone." It's a prepackaged ice cream cone (comes in chocolate chip cookie dough and Cherry Garcia). If you've ever had a prepackaged cone you know the cone always gets soggy and tastes like shit. Thanks to new technology The Cone is filled with chocolate which separates the ice cream from the cone and keeps the cone crunchy.
So they are doing a generous and creative promotional plan (as they always do), giving away 50,000 cones the past few days in Manhattan and we decided to do the story and have our anchors eat ice cream on the set. As I've mentioned before, the more fun a segment is, the more work I have to do. So this was very time consuming to coordinate. It also was scheduled to air about an hour after the Turkey airport fire, creating other problems, but we pressed ahead. The segment worked out fine, I went to meet the guy and he told me he left 9 extras on the table. By the time I got there, they were already eaten by the show's crew, people who had nothing to do with the segment, including one fat fuck (at least 3 bills) who was stuffing his face and taunting me. So the Ben & Jerry's guy felt bad and promised to send more.
Yesterday afternoon Ben & Jerry's apparently called and asked to speak with someone on the show's staff. They were transferred to a friend of mine who sends out an e-mail to the entire staff of the show, hundreds of people at several different locations, saying ice cream will be here tomorrow (friday), delivered to Paul. That is what we in the hood call "putting you on blast."
So all morning, I'm getting messages and e-mails and questions from people about the ice cream. It gets so bad at one point that my reporter says "we need to go to management and demand that everyone get a $2 raise so they can buy their own fuckin ice cream." Finally, the ice cream comes, they bring 6 cases, 72 bars. So I hand deliver to the show staff (who actually deserve it) and the writers (who were secretly messaging someone else about it, and we both ended up bringing some to them) and by the time I get to my desk 90% of the cones are gone and my desk and the floor around it are strewn with garbage.
The cone was great, once I finally ate it, and I stashed one away for myself until Tuesday although I doubt it will survive that long.
That same fat fuck came over and took more ice cream by the way. But there were still about four cones left when seemingly everyone was offered.
Figure about 60 people got ice cream, most of them undeserving, some said thank you if I was there when they got a cone. Exactly three people messaged me to say thank you, fewer than those who messaged me to ask "where's the ice cream?"
I've always said free food tastes better but I would never comport myself like that. Disgusting.


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