Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

If you’re not in the Facebook generation, or if you haven’t been on Facebook lately, you may have missed one of the most popular applications on the social network - Scrabulous. A clone of the popular board game, Scrabble, the appeal of Scrabulous is that you can play it while you’re on Facebook.

And play it, they do - to the tune of 595,000 people per day! How many people are playing the original board game each day? Probably not that many.

But Scrabulous’ success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Toy makers Hasbro and Mattel, who jointly own the rights to the board game, have asked Facebook to remove the application from its network. This may not be a triple-word-score move on their part, however.

Think about it - when was the last time that someone of the Facebook generation sat down to play a board game? They’re too busy poking and wall-writing and twittering to play traditional board games anymore. But take that same game and put it into Facebook, and it’s an instant hit. Hasbro and Mattel are shooting themselves in the foot by pursuing Scrabulous like this.

Instead of reaching out to a whole new generation of would-be fans, they stand to alienate them. And even if they were to re-introduce their own version of Scrabble for Facebook, memories of their takedown of Scrabulous will still likely remain, and adoption of a new game will be slow.

The best thing for Hasbro and Mattel to do would be to sit down with the original makers of Scrabulous and iron out some kind of licensing deal. Keep the original game up on Facebook and work with the developers to try porting other Hasbro/Mattel licensed games over to Web 2.0.

But this site is called AwfulMarketing for a reason - and we’re not betting on Hasbro and Mattel to play nice with this one.

Do you love Scrabulous? Here are a few things you can do:

There’s a Facebook Group (of course) called Save Scrabulous, an online petition, a poll, and the contact information for Hasbro and Mattel.

Oh Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye…

Think your holiday airplane trip was bad? Listen to this one…

It ended up being a trip from hell for wheelchair-bound Jeanne Grettum of California this year.  She was on her way from CA to Orlando, Florida to visit her family, and during a stop in Las Vegas for a connecting flight, US Airways personnel wheeled her out onto the tarmac to catch her plane, but left her sitting there, alone, for 12 hours.

12 hours with no food, water, or jacket, until she was finally noticed by an airport employee and wheeled into a hallway - where she was again left alone for quite some time.  It wasn’t until 3 AM that she could get to a phone and let her daughter know what had happened.   

“She called me at 3 o’clock in the morning crying hysterical because she didn’t know what to do and no one would help her,” her daughter recalled in a television interview.

It took about six hours for the daughter to get the travel mess straightened out with US Airways and get her mother out to Florida.

And what did U.S. Air have to say for themselves? “We are not happy to hear about this incident,” U.S. Air said in a statement. “We will work with our employees because that’s not how we deal with our customers.”

We should hope not.

Grettum is happy that the ordeal is behind her, but is worried about her return trip back to California - because it’s booked on U.S. Air!

Let U.S. Air’s Customer Relations folks know this is unacceptable.

Read the news story on this incident.

Now this isn’t any way to win customer loyalty - a Wheeling Illinois TGI Friday’s restaurant asked a disabled customer and her companion guide dog to leave the restaurant a few days ago because they claimed guide dogs weren’t allowed, and didn’t have to be, no matter what the federal law stated.

17-Year old Laura Greenberg, disabled a decade ago from a brain injury, can no longer walk or talk. She depends on her trained Golden Retriever guide dog to help her out in many situations - and under the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s perfectly legal for her to bring the dog into any restaurant. Laura’s mother even showed restaurant employees the Public Access Card, which explains the ADA guidelines.

Greenburg and her party were told that since there was already someone available to help her (her mom), the dog wouldn’t be allowed inside.

Greenberg’s mother told a local paper that her family has never had an issue before with bringing the dog into any other restaurant or shop.

The restaurant did issue a statement apologizing for the incident:

“We are very sorry for the terrible mistake our restaurant made. We absolutely should have accommodated our guest and her companion dog. We have contacted the guest to offer our sincerest apologies and we have re-educated restaurant management on proper procedures to ensure a similar situation does not occur.”

As for the employee who turned them away, Greenberg’s family says they don’t want that particular employee fired, but would like them better educated on ADA guidelines.

Many other patrons in the restaurant overheard Greenberg’s party being turned away, and also left the restaurant in protest.

Don’t like what you’ve just read? Let TGI Fridays know: TGI Fridays Guest Contact Form

Update - 12/11/07 - Welcome Digg visitors! Several recent comments have asked for links to news stories about this issue. Here you go:

• Dogs that are a help, not a hindrance
• Wheeling restaurant apologizes after refusing service to disabled teen

Tomorrow is December 1st - welcome to office holiday party season 2007. This is one of the most dangerous times of year for your job and your reputation - tread carefully. Many a career has been ruined by misbehavior at a hall-decked holiday office party.

Here are 5 simple rules to follow to ensure that the gift under your tree this year isn’t a pink slip:

1) Watch the alcohol consumption. This should really go without saying, but overdoing the sauce is probably the #1 cause of office-party horrors. If you can keep this first rule in mind, obeying the next four can be a piece of cake!

2) No hanky-panky. No matter how much you’ve been lusting after that hottie in accounting, now is NOT the time to make your move, casanova. What happens at the office party certainly doesn’t stay at the office party, and the gossip will be starting before the kiss even ends.

3) Mind the crumbs. Remember what mom said, you weren’t raised in a barn. Behave yourself and mind your manners. Say please and thank you, use the correct fork, and chew with your mouth closed - no one wants “see food.”

4) No gifts, brown-noser. This may not apply to every place of business, but in most cases, it’s inappropriate to hand out a gift to your boss in public. If you must feed the urge to give them something, do it in private, back at the office, and don’t give something lavish or over-the-top. Even a small plate of home-made cookies says “happy holidays” without going overboard.

5) You’re not ABBA - don’t be a dancing queen. Save the moves for DDR and the singing for the privacy of your own shower. The last thing you want is your performance documented on YouTube, and posted on the company intranet.

Follow these 5 tips, and you should find yourself gainfully employed (and not shamed) come New Year.

Happy Holidays.

A law school student in Britain stole over $10,000 in an eBay scam and trashed his hopes of ever practicing as a lawyer in the process.

34-year-old Asif Ahmed, 34, listed a number of electronic items for sale on eBay, and of course did not send the nonexistent items when the auctions were completed.

The silly part of this is that Ahmed used his own name and bank information when he sold the bogus goods, so it was easy for law enforcement officials to track him down when the complaints started rolling in.

His sentence for the scam? 300 hours community service. Think this is sufficient for the crime, or should they have been harder on him?

This man in Sacramento, CA was sentenced to 2 years in prison for the same type of crime, albeit he did take a little more money.

Think there is a sentencing discrepancy here - UK vs. US?