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.
