Ink cartridge rant

The copy on this sell-page for a remanufactured HP ink cartridge isn't the normal bland description; instead, it's a heartfelt rant, apparently by the person in charge of writing the site's mindless verbiage. Either that, or it's a stunt to get linkage to an otherwise boring web-page (if so, mission accomplished!):

Remanufactured HP 300. Contains 8ml of high quality pigment ink and will print 380 ... Do you know what? I really can't be bothered with writing these description anymore, it's a printer cartridge! What am I supposed to write really??? It's a cartridge that prints ink on to paper, you could print some work stuff or a colouring in page for the kids that they'll half do and then leave laying around on the floor or a poster of the horrible Jonas Bothers for your teen daughter hoping that she might stop listening to there pathetic attempt of music so much. There good quality cartridges I'll admit that, every time I've sneakily took some home with me they've worked perfectly, but the thing that's doing my head in now is writing about them day in and day out with the boss giving me an impossible deadline to finish them all by which means I can't even sit at my desk pretending to work like I know most people do in this place. My advice to you is if you've got to this page then you probably need a cartridge, or you have a weird fetish for ink cartridges, either way it's a ink cartridge, it works perfectly, so if you want one buy one, if you don't then why havn't you left this page allready?
Signed: The guy who writes the boring everyday mundane descriptions about printer cartridges everyday.

Remanufactured HP 300 - (CC640EE) Black (Thanks, Mark!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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robcat2075

They need what this sports website has, software that writes the cliches for you:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28digi.html?scp=1&sq=software%20sports&st=cse
13strong

Hmm, thought it sounded fake, but the horrible spelling/grammatical mistakes make me think otherwise.
Caroline

The Buggre Alle This ink cartridge page?
bwcbwc

Reminds me of some of the ad copy on woot.com. I wonder if they picked up a former employee.
Baron Karza

I think that the grammar looks too poor to be from a professional copywriter. If it is from one, I’d like the job please..
Anonymous

“This Account Has Been Suspended”

Now that’s VERY stupid, SEO wise.
Oskar

The best part is at the bottom, in small text:

*Page yield is approximate.

Well, you don’t want to get sued, do you now?
Anonymous

Reminds me of my high school history test responses.
cjp

Hiring a grade five ESL student to write your ads is a questionable business move.
freetard

I’m sure the guy’s boss isn’t too happy that their website was DoS’d into oblivion because of his hilarious rant!
Anonymous

Oh man – Caroline beat me to it – I was immediately reminded of Gaiman and Pratchett’s _Good_Omens_ as well…
jimkirk

Decades ago IBM printed manuals were famous for pages with nothing but “this page intentionally left blank” on it. One manual had a screed about the idiocy of that, the number of trees wasted, et cetera inserted under the blank verbiage that some tech writer snuck into the manual.
- teapot
  
  Booklets are a bastard because page-wise everything is in fours. If you want to create a consistent layout there will invariably be ‘wasted’ pages. I suspect they printed “this page intentionally left blank” on it because they got a million jackasses calling their customer service asking why some pages of their manual had not been printed.
  
  I can see this irking a tech-minded person, because the mantra there is efficient design but in the printed material world, its not the same… Printing stuff is always wasteful.
M

American Science Center (now American Science and Surplus) was doing this 30 years ago in their shoddy newsprint pre-internet catalogs. They were doing it because most of what they sold then was industrial small parts surplus, and in many cases they really didn’t know the purpose the part they were selling was originally intended for, so they made things up, in The Onion style.

These days they mostly know what they’re selling, and the listings are a lot less interesting: http://www.sciplus.com/
- M
  
  Here’s a page that shows a shadow of the past in some of the descriptions: http://www.sciplus.com/index.cfm/go/front.tagged/tag/mommo
  - Anonymous
    
    I love their approach. Their descriptions (even the non-funny ones) are written in plain english, not sales speak. Perhaps ironically it makes me want to buy their stuff more.
    
    Nice site too.
    - penguinchris
      
      I never understood sales-speak. Surely they realize that crap turns people off? Give me just the facts, or if you’re a good writer, add some humor like these examples. I assume the people who can only do sales-speak are incompetent.
Jonners

It’s a faint echo of a famous* rant by Scott Murray of The Guardian newspaper a few years back:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2003/mar/14/cricketworldcup2003.overbyoverreports

* Well-known among cricket fans online, anyway.
Anonymous

Back when I was an inexperienced web developer, I wrote a bunch of funny test text to make sure my changes were working correctly.

Only I forgot to remove the text before making the new site live.

Fast forward to the phone call threatening to fire me at 12:05 on New Year’s Eve.

Now I just add an extra period at the end of a sentence when I need to test…
chazlarson

We’ve got a surplus shop here in Mpls/St.Paul [Ax-Man Surplus] where all the signs in-store are short versions of this sort of thing.

My favorite recent find was on a box of triangular trigger spray bottles. It read, “We lost the sign for the triangular spray bottles. $1.95 ea.”.
Anonymous

If the writer was trying to suspend his account, then indeed mission accomplished. He is clearly not afraid to risk what he has, and I have no doubt he will quickly find a much more rewarding job. Maybe even with a company that understands that there is no such thing as bad publicity :-)
Lobster

Don’t worry, I’m a few weeks away from solving this problem forever.

(Hint: it’s a trained octopus)
Christopher Vigliotti

dig it