Following up on recent posts about humorous voicemails and emails, here’s another humorous voicemail. The story behind the voicemail is explained here, and in the letter below.
Mr. Kinsella:
I stumbled over this website courtesy of an article about the
recent humorous voicemail and couldn’t resist writing you to share something amusing that happened to our company.
Our Austin-based company, Despair Inc., produces cynical humor products- including parodies of motivational posters
called Demotivators.
Anyway, our logo features the
emoticon–which we
obviously did not invent but nevertheless submitted a trademark request for to the USPTO.
To our surprise (and our IP lawyer’s amazement), we received a
trademark for the symbol in printed matter class of goods.
As a joke, we wrote a fake press release about how–in light of our trademark on the
symbol–we planned to sue several million individuals who had used the symbol in email of late.
It was mostly meant as a rip on frivolous IP lawsuits. But
because of some clumsy reporting and overzealous netizens, it ended up becoming a gigantic outrage to many thousands of people who missed the joke.
The most amusing contact we received came in the form of a late-night voicemail from someone who sounded very drunk.
http://www.despair.com/frownies.html The voicemail is linked in the page above. It is expletive-laden and frequently incoherent–but provoked gales of laughter and ultimately, the desire to share the joke with others.
We bleeped out the expletives–as we’re a pretty family-friendly
website–but even without them, it’s a very amusing and
confusing listen, though admittedly, for a somewhat select audience.
Hope you enjoy it.
Cheers,
Justin Sewell
Despair, Inc.
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