I’m fortunate to have a full-time cook at home. He’s great and can prepare a meal with the best of them. He can cook more than just Pakistani food too — Chinese, Sri Lankan, Continental, etc., so we’re really happy that he chose to work with us.

My only real gripe with him is that he hasn’t been able to make a decent spaghetti sauce from scratch. I love spaghetti. My kids love spaghetti. It’s important to get spaghetti right in our home. Anyway, I eventually got a little tired with the experimentation and bought some Ragu spaghetti sauce a few days ago.

He made spaghetti today. He used the sauce and it turned out well. I just had seconds.

Now, here’s my problem: He’s a damn good cook. Do I let him know that it turned out well? After all, He didn’t really do anything except brown the mince and boil the pasta. He knows this. He knows that I resorted to store-bought sauce after he failed to make it well enough for us to like. Do I run the risk of offending him by congratulating him on a job well done?

Why am I blogging about this? Because this conundrum made me ask myself how I’d feel if I was in a similar situation. What if a client wasn’t happy with a logo/website/ad I was designing? What if I tried my hardest and it just wasn’t working out? What if the client went off to TemplateMonster or StockLayouts (really now, don’t expect me to link to them!) and bought some prefab design for me to build on?

I’d be pissed. Really pissed. I’d have an attitude and then some. I’d refuse to complete the job if it meant using some generic art.

So, I’m left wondering if using Ragu is the same as using a template.

Side note: I’m bothered by how similar the Ragu logo is to Burger King’s.

I was flipping through a local magazine this morning called, Mr., and came across this unattributed photograph.

It carried the headline, “How To Know That Your Ass Is Too Small,” and I thought it was hilarious!

Technorati Tags: flying, donkey, cart, heavy, karachi, pakistan

I’m becoming more and more addicted to blog-reading. It’s a great way for me to deal with the lack of adult human contact that I’m faced with, now that I’m freelancing full time again.

Here are some of the posts I’ve read of late that I feel would interesting/beneficial reading for a lot of people:

Full post: adliterate – Separated by a common language

Extract: My first love is design.

I got into advertising by accident. I was all set to become an industrial designer, when irresistable lure of Geography took me away from the path of righteousness (which is another story). And a love of design is handy these days since it is looming ever larger in the lives of advertising people.

Full post: Noisy Decent Graphics – Advice: Always do it for real

Extract: As a designer, if you’re asked to put some hand writing onto a brochure of a document, do it for real. DO NOT use a hand writing font. (How can you have a hand writing font, anyway?) Write the text out and scan it in.

If you need some distressed type, then print the type out, screw it up, photocopy it, re-screw it up, re-photocopy it and so on and so on. Distress it for real, DO NOT use a distressed type font.

Full post: Mark Bixby – Your Domain Sucks.com

Extract: Following an abysmal interaction with PNM‘s customer service department (New Mexico’s public utility company) I went online in search of a consumer advocate group with whom I could share my despair.

Knowing it was a long shot, I pointed Firefox to PNMsucks.com with the hope of discovering a vocal opponent to these “evil-doers”. No such luck. Interestingly, a quick domain lookup revealed that PNM was fully aware of their negative perception, and had preemptively purchased the domain… for ten years.

Full post: Graphic Design Blog – I Want it Free and I Want it Now!

Extract: Imagine you walk into a electrical shop. “Hello Mrs/Mr Smith” says the shop owner, “How can I help you today.” You know Mr Brown, the shop owner quite well as you buy a lot of your electrical goods from him. “Its my friends birthday, I’d like an MP3 player please,” you say. “Of course says the shop owner and shows you his complete range. You choose the one you want, take it and start to walk towards the door. “Ummm.. Mrs/Mr Smith, you’ve forgotten to pay.” “No, I’ve bought a lot of stuff from you so I’m having this for free,” you say.

I was talking to a checkout clerk at D-Mart (a chain of large-size supermarkets in Karachi) this afternoon and I asked him why there’s never anyone manning their big and blocked off cigarette counter. He answered with a really dejected look on his face,

Why even have such a big supermarket when you’re not going to hire enough people to run it?

I went on to suggest that they should just remove the counter and make that area self-service, just like the rest of the place, to which he replied,

These people are only interested in making money, so they sell off everything (meaning that the area is sponsored). We can’t remove the counter because it’s got a big logo on it (Marlboro’s logo, incidentally).

He went on to add that their isn’t even any point in forwarding customer complaints to management, because they’ve never done anything about it in the past, so why would they start now.

This guy’s pretty pissed off with his employer!

I’m a pretty regular customer there and I know that not a lot gets done there to improve the customer experience. Sure, it’s a lot more like foreign markets, with it’s wide aisles, air conditioning and bright lighting, but it really stops there. You can’t do your monthly groceries there because they won’t have everything you want. There are always a few things that one needs which are always going to be missing. For example; ziploc-type sandwich bags, aluminum foil, mortein refills, etc.

And to top it off, you’ve got staff so disgruntled that they’ve decide to let customers in on the problems. It feels very much like a “Don’t tell me, I just work here.” vibe. Someone in management has to figure out that their staff are the people shoppers interact with and if they’re not going to be taken seriously, then that indifference is going to be passed on in the staff’s interaction with people like me.

To be honest, I’ll still go there because I’m a supermarket whore — I love the places — and D-Mart’s fun for my kids to roam about in, but I’ve got it in the back of my mind now that this place isn’t well run and its staff aren’t really happy campers.

The chain’s not been around long enough and hasn’t launched any activities build up any real consumer loyalty either, so this really isn’t the best time to have things go astray.

Technorati : d-mart, demoralised, dmart, management, morale, staff

Wow, A post I wrote about Joost got Dugg by someone! It got lost in the all the day’s Diggs at their site, but at least I know that someone actually reads what I write. Woohoo.

Technorati Tags: digg, dugg, joost,