Stoned

Remember the pointless promotional stone that computer company Acer sent to thousands of disinterested Gulf News readers way back at the beginning of summer last year? The one attached to the blob of ad-babble (‘Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy...’) that was rather pathetically promoting the Acer Gemstone laptop?

I had a desk clearout yesterday and found the blasted thing, lurking behind a pencil pot.

Obviously my bid to swap it for the moon á la One Red Paperclip has not really worked very well as evidenced by the fact that I don’t own the moon and I still have a small, smooth and black stone with a flaw in it lurking on my desk at work.

As some may recall, I tried giving it away to colleagues but no-one would take it. And I can’t really just throw it away after all this time: I feel the need to get some sort of value out of it.

But what? What on earth can you do with a piece of promotional stone?

Fake Plastic Chicken

It's not that pal and colleague Carrington has posted up a rubber chicken for auction on Facebook. It's not that he took the trouble to photograph the damn thing. It's not even that the bird-flu resistant rubbery piece of poultry is known to form part of a massive collection of totally useless things because Carrington collects useless things.

It's the fact that the item in question has so far gathered 57 views and already attracted two offers. If this success continues, I'm going to put my Acer Promotional Stone up for auction.

(PS: I've just realised where he got the damn chicken from! Unwanted gift! I'm hurt!)

One Black Acer Promotional Stone

Remember One Red Paperclip? The kid (Kyle MacDonald) that bartered a paperclip in a series of increasingly unlikely and jaw-dropping swaps that saw him eventually get a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan out of it all? Put aside, for a second, the question of whether you'd want to live in Kipling Sakatchewan. Because I’ve had an idea.

It started with the Acer Pointless Promotional Stone, pictured above in loving TechniColour. You see, it was sitting there on my desk after I wrote the grumpy post about the (s) ad campaign that was supposed to promote the Acer Gemstone laptop. I tried giving it away, but colleagues wouldn’t take it – they kept giving it back. One pointed out, quite correctly, that the stone in question had a flaw in it (true) and that it wasn’t a gemstone anyway so what on earth did it have to do with a computer called Gemstone?

Which, I have say, I could only agree with.

So the thing remains sat there on my desk, an object so utterly useless that I can’t even give it away. Which spawned the idea of going one step further than ‘one red paperclip’. I am going to set out to swap my totally useless and fundamentally undesirable stone (an object even less valuable, anyone reasonable would agree, than a paperclip), with the ultimate objective of owning the moon.

I know it might seem like a big leap, but if you think of it more as just a giant step it doesn’t look so daunting. Just to make it more attractive, I am prepared to offer the stone along with the promotional text that accompanied it at no extra charge.

Anyone want to make the first offer?

Acer in Pointless Promo Shock Horror

I was mildly amused at the kind gift of a small, flat stone from Acer Computer attached to my Gulf News this morning. I was mildly irritated that the package was glued to the front page headline and tore the page when I tried to remove it as carefully as I could, but we'll put that down to early morning biorhythms.

There were many newsworthy things in today's papers, including the fantastic and most welcome news that Wadi Warraya (or Wurraya or Waraya or any other way you want to spell it) is to be, belatedly, declared a protected zone. This great news was not in Emirates Today which, you may remember, did launch a concerted one day campaign 'Save the Wadi Fish' that was based around an interview with a conservationist working in Waraya. A big bag of bite size Snickers Crunchers says that ET does a piece taking the credit tomorrow. For now, GN can sit back and enjoy that warm, fuzzy feeling that rewards those who get a decent scoop.

But it was Acer's stone that stayed with me. Disregarding the sage advice of French poet Alain Bosquet, I did not regard my stone so long, so long that it accepted to speak in my place. No, I looked for the invariable ad that explained the invitation attached to the stone: "Nature Shapes, Technology Creates. Individuality is yours alone to enjoy... find out more inside."

Any ad that accompanies such a slice of unremittingly daft and pointless pseudo-empowerment blather is, I thought, going to provide some mild entertainment value at least.

I finally found the ad, buried deeply in swathes of four-page spreads from real estate companies. If you take a minute to go through GN reading the headlines of the ads, you start to understand what Ken Kesey meant by recreating the acid experience without taking the drug:

Experience fine living...because attention to detail is not just a commitment, it's a way of life...; Once a year, the Cereus blooms in darkness; tycoon by day, connoisseur by night; Sea Side Living Starts Today; Your gateway to island living; Live and work in absolute grandeur; Your aspiration for a better tomorrow; Homes created around your lifestyle; Earth, sun, wind and water - the constituents of life, and the quintessence of being; not just another address in the making but a marvel with features extraordinaire...

It's a bewildering array of jumbled up words, sloganeering with no applied intelligence: declamatory, mindless blipverts of aspirational words slung at your psyche in a barrage of positivity and over-promising.

How, you may be starting to think, are our stone-wielding friends ever going to cut through? Answer: they're not. It took me three runs through the paper to find it. And I was looking for the daft thing. The ad was buried on the left hand page 20 and was made of the same old language as all the rest of it. 'Emotion, individuality and temptation at a glance' it starts. Hang on, this is a PC, isn't it? Just checking, thought it might be an apartment in Full Moon Bay. And then, for some strange reason, the next headline is 'Dolby surround sound speakers'! It's like being jerked from a page of Paulo Coelho to a supermarket flyer.

The other words in the ad are irrelevant, you can put them together in any order you like and they'll mean just as much. Print them, cut them out and try it.

Unrivalled | Empowered | Wonder | Style | Concept | Technological | Natural | Performance | Prestige

However, I now have a stone that I didn't have before and for this, like so many other small mercies, I am truly grateful.