I love seeing how humour and satire and irony make their way into every form of communication, especially when the humour is manifested in an unexpected place. For some time now Amazon product reviews have been leaders in the genre, as people hijacked the space creatively and joyously.
Even Wikipedia has had its day when it comes to offbeat humour. Some years ago there was the unusual situation where the banter was between a solitary individual on one side and an entire crowd on the other. That’s what happened on 30 July 2009, when the Wikipedia article on Caroline of Brunswick came in for a prolonged burst of collective vandalism, with someone called William Avery bravely putting his finger in the dyke while edits sought to flood through. Just read this report of a day’s play (or more accurately a day’s rain) at Edgbaston; start from the bottom, you will catch my drift. Here’s how it looked on Wikipedia:
The hijack of the WaitroseReasons hashtag some months ago, while initially galling for the firm, probably gave it quite positive publicity by the end, when people could see how the company dealt with the issue.
Today, again, I learnt of levity in an unexpected place: customer care, and again on Twitter. Apparently Tesco Mobile is now manned by a person or people with something that purports to be a sense of humour:
You may not like the humour (I confess I found some of the tweets funny enough to smile). You can’t fault the sense of authenticity though, which is probably why some of the tweets have been RTed thousands of times.
Hat tip to PSFK for the original story on the Tesco Tweets.