What This Woman Really Wants Is Not A Vacuum Cleaner

Dear Oreck,

Thank you so much for including me in your current direct mail marketing campaign for your "What A Woman Really Wants Sale." (emphasis yours) You know, most campaigns are boring, use big words and don't really speak to me in a language that my female brain can understand. But you spoke my language: purses, flowers, candles, stilettos, BFFs, beauty sleep, and diamond rings. Best of all, you tell me how I can be "Queen of [My] Castle" as I spend my days cheerfully vacuuming. And you did it using the Universal Female Colors pink and green. I can't begin to thank you enough for your thoughtfulness and ability to speak to the woman of the late-1950s and early-1960s.

Oh, wait. This is 2010. Ya, so that means, I'm pretty offended.

Seriously, what are you thinking? Are you using Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce to create your ad campaigns? I guess on the upside, you didn't suggest I go ask my husband if I can get a new vacuum or ask him to buy me one because I haven't burned dinner this week. Do you really think that I can only be inspired to make a purchase when your ad dangles graphics of purses, stilettos, flowers, and diamond rings in it? Do you think I'm that simple and shallow?

Let me tell you that I'm not so simple, shallow, and easily persuaded. In fact, your marketing campaign, while it succeeded in getting me to talk about it (congratulations on that), has completely turned me off to your company. It turned me off because now when I think "Oreck," I'll think "The Company That Talks to Women Like We're Idiots." And that's kinda bad.

Shall we take a look at your flier and point out all the ways in which it's sexist?

Notice how the cover doesn't even have a vacuum on it. It's got a purse with a flower and offers me some free votive candles if I try the Oreck Edge. Evidently, it doesn't matter what the Oreck Edge is because what's important to me, as a woman, obviously, is free votive candles. Do you see the little white graphics of rings, purses, birds, gloves, buttons, hats, safety pins, perfume bottles, and tiaras?

On the inside of the front cover, I learn what the Oreck Edge is and how it will make me Queen of My Castle, complete with a tiara graphic! Note to Oreck: I HAVE a tiara. Two, in fact, but I don't wear them while I clean and vacuuming doesn't make me feel like a queen. What would make me feel like a queen, actually, would be having someone else clean my house. Like maybe my husband. (Ya, that statement just made a whole lotta single men line up to marry me!).

Notice the cute play on words with the graphic of the stiletto . . . Get it? HIGH hopes and the HIGH heel stiletto? Clever.

I am so grateful to Oreck for reminding me (and all women) that when we accepted (or accept in the future) that diamond ring and said our "I Do's," what we are really agreeing to is a life of vacuuming and servitude to our husbands. I also LOVE the reference to the "magic wand" in the ad. If I had a magic wand, I would wave it and I'd never have to clean again.

Finally, I love how using Oreck products is going to allow me to get more "beauty sleep" and my vacuum will be my BFF.

While the name of my blog is Little Merry Sunshine, I'm anything but stupid, simple, or shallow. In the future, I'd appreciate being spoken to and advertised to in a way that respects my intelligence. Until then, I'll stick with Hoover.

Little Merry Sunshine

Email Etiquette Refresher Course

I'm not even sure where to begin on this topic. I really thought we had covered this ad nauseam, but based on the number of people who get to Little Merry Sunshine from the search terms "to vs cc" or "email etiquette" and the number of emails I continue to receive where the sender clearly doesn't get this concept, I guess not.

Just today, I received an email message from a business I've never been to in a neighboring town announcing that a woman I've done business with in the past has joined the company. Super. Good for her. Really. I'm happy she's found a new job and I've enjoyed doing business with her in the past, so might have continued until I realized that (1) the email was not from her, but was from her new employer and (2) the email was sent to me and about 50 other people, all of who's email addresses I could see.

What irked me was that she had given my email address to her new employer rather than contacting me herself, so now I'm on their email list. But what irked me more was that the business cared so little for protecting their client list (or maybe more appropriately their hopeful client list) and did not use BCC. The business in question has no idea what the recipients will use that email list for or to whom they will forward all those email addresses.

Personally, my client list is my business lifeblood and I wouldn't give or sell or trade that away for anything. When I email my clients, I always use BCC. Not only do I want to protect the privacy of my client base, but I want to protect my own business. How does this business owner know that someone won't give that list to their competition?

What did I do with the email? I wrote the owner back (I did not hit "reply all") and asked to be removed from the email list and never to be contacted again.

Just so we're clear, if the people in the group all have a reason to know the others are receiving the email, then using TO or CC is fine. For example, if you are emailing a group to confirm an upcoming meeting, use TO or CC. There may need to be some pre-meeting discussion via email between all the attendees and having those emails is useful. Sending out a newsletter, business announcement, reunion notice, etc. where the recipients have nothing in common, do not need to be in touch with each other, or haven't given you explicit permission to share their email should be done through BCC.

I know that it feels like there is no privacy in this world of interconnectedness, but a little common sense and asking yourself the question of "Would I want this email list shared outside of this group of people?" or "If I were a recipient would I want all these people having my email address?" will usually give you the right answer of when to use To vs. CC vs. BCC.

Because privacy is such a big deal, I'm reposting one of the most popular blog posts of all time on Little Merry Sunshine.

To vs. CC vs. BCC
November 22, 2008

I have a pet peeve and it's been tripped up again. Given that I have lost friends over this particular pet peeve in the past, I thought I would put this out to my blog readers and see what you all think. I'm open to the fact that I'm simply overreacting to this and have been wrong all these years.

My pet peeve is when people send out emails to a huge list of recipients who are not all known to each other and put everyone in the TO or CC field rather than the BCC field.

The TO and CC fields allow all the recipients to see one another's email addresses. In some instances, this is fine and necessary. Those instances usually include times when some sort of conversation is taking place via email and the recipients need to be able to respond to everyone.

It is my belief, however, that if an email is strictly informational (e.g., marketing emails, jokes, political, religious, newsletters, etc.) then BCC should be used.

I run my own business and work hard to respect the privacy of my clients. I never send out emails to my entire client using the TO or CC fields. I believe it's just rude. I don't know what my clients are doing with the emails (hopefully, forwarding them to their family and friends - that's how referrals are built!) and I don't want my email address book to end up in the wrong hands.

Previously, a good friend of mine (now a former friend) would send out all those unsupported urban legends to huge lists of people using TO or CC. None of them were ever true as they were easily disproved using snopes.com. I politely repeatedly asked this friend to check out snopes.com before forwarding these outrageous emails , use BCC, or take me off the list. Multiple emails later, that all used TO or CC, I hit "Reply All" (on purpose) and politely told everyone that whatever the newest urban legend was, wasn't true and included the supporting documentation. My friend blew up at me and we haven't spoken since. I know that hitting "Reply All" was rude and probably embarrassed her. But I truly did not know what else to do.

A couple of years later, I had a distant family member on the other side of the country do the same thing but with religious emails. And his friends, none of whom I knew, would repeatedly hit "Reply All" to discuss their church activities. Personally, the religious emails offended me on many levels, but I felt like I was in a Catch-22. I enjoyed the ability to keep in touch with my relatives, but did not share their fundamentalist religious beliefs. Again, I replied to my relative (not everyone) and shared with him my request to use BCC or to not send me the religious emails, but he didn't. These emails continued for weeks until I finally wrote and sternly requested, in an email only to my family member, that I be removed from the list and only contacted for family-related business. My family member hasn't spoken to me since.

This has started to happen again with someone I knew peripherally from college marketing his new business. I have written this person (not the entire group) and politely asked him to please use BCC and related how much my clients appreciate when I respect their privacy and I know his will too. But now I'm questioning myself. UPDATE: The person wrote me back, thanked me for bringing this to his attention and said he would use BCC from now on.

Do you run into this To vs. CC vs. BCC problem? How do you handle it?

I am open to the possibility that I am overreacting and that the rest of the world does not find this problematic.

Discuss.

I'll step off my soapbox now. Thank you for reading.

I Won A Lincoln Navigator! Maybe.

Because I work for myself and from my home, I sometimes get some bizarre phone calls. I also get some strange phone calls because my phone number is one digit off from a local auto parts store. Despite the number of times I explain to some people that I'm not the auto parts store, some people call back three or four times in a day. For the record, I know nothing about cars and anything I might tell anyone about car parts would surely be made up. But this isn't about those calls . . .

About 7:45 tonight I received what will surely go down as the strangest phone call in weeks.

Me (in a chipper voice): Hello.

Caller: Hi. I'm calling to inform you that someone at your house was entered to win a Lincoln Navigator by another person and you've won. Can you come to a winners' ceremony tomorrow?

Me (suspiciously): Um, for whom are you calling?

Caller: Oh, sorry. I'm calling for (name of some company I've since forgotten - probably fake).

Me: No. I mean, for whom in my house are you calling?

Caller: Oh, I don't know.

Me: Then how do you know I've won?

Caller: (Total silence)

Me: Well, then I guess we're busy tomorrow. Thanks for calling. Good bye.

And I hung up.

Yep. Just a typical Monday night at my house.

The Hug-E-Gram - The Perfect Gift for Valentine's Day

Are you still looking for the perfect Valentine's Day Gift? I'm sure you know how much is riding on Valentine's Day and there's enormous pressure to get it just right, so you'd better not screw this up.

Not to worry. Little Merry Sunshine (thanks to her college friend Koko) has just the perfect gift for you. The Hug-E-Gram!

Your Valentine will treasure this thoughtful gift for years to come. Whenever you can't be there to wrap your loving arms around her, the "two soft plush cotton arms with cartoon hands . . . create a soft and cuddly hug giving a heartwarming feeling" that will remind her of your undying affection.

But wait! It gets better! You can even whisper sweet nothings in her ear as you "hug" her by recording your own voice in the Hug-E-Gram!

There's even more! Your Hug-E-Gram will even be delivered with a bouquet of wooden roses because nothing smells quite as sweet as . . . wooden roses? On the upside, they won't wilt on Monday.

You must HURRY! You've only got until 1pm ET (that's 12noon for you Midwesterners) to place your order so they can rush your Hug-E-Gram for Saturday delivery. It's just $64.98 with overnight delivery, but your Sweetie is worth that, right?

Just look at how happy and fulfilled this woman seems. She clearly couldn't feel more love if her beloved were right there embracing her himself.

What You Do To The Least of These, You Do To Me

Do you know who is credited with the phrase in the title of this post? I'll give you a hint. The exact quote is "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Jesus Christ is said to have made that statement in the parable about The Judgment of Nations. I'm not a religious person, but what this statement says to me is that the way we treat the least among us (both the good and bad ways we treat people), those who are unable to help themselves, says more about us as a human race than anything else.

If you live in Illinois, you are undoubtedly aware of the debate in Springfield about the state's budget woes. Governor Quinn, like many other governors before him, is threatening to cut the state's human services programs by 50% unless the state legislators approve the 50% increase in state income taxes. Currently, Illinois taxes residents a flat 3% income tax. Under Governor Quinn's plan, that income tax would increase to 4 1/2% for two years and then revert back to the 3% tax rate.

What are human services? Many people mistakenly think of human services simply as welfare for poor people who don't pay taxes. That would be a far too simplistic explanation of it. Yes, human services includes programs for the poor (and by poor, I mean people who live further below the poverty line than you can possibly imagine), but it also includes programs for the disabled including special education, tutors, rehabilitative services, personal assistants (not someone to come take dictation, but someone to come in and assist the client with everyday living activities like getting dressed, bathing, etc.), respite care, residential services, drug and alcohol programs, programs for the elderly, day care, foster care services, and many other programs that anyone at any time could need.

The Republican legislators, while saying they do not want to cut these services, refuse to support Governor Quinn's tax increase plan. They say that cuts are necessary in other areas of the State budget. Democrats also do not want to cut human services and are generally supporting the Governor's tax plan. And that's where the impasse lies.

Human services programs are at the core of who we are. Any of us could become disabled or have a child with severe disabilities. With any luck, we will all live to a ripe old age and the elderly programs will make our lives a bit better. In this economy, we never know when we will lose our job and need assistance from some of the state run jobs programs. How we treat the least among us speaks volumes about us as a society. Illinois needs all the human services we have. They simply are not optional. Holding them hostage in these budget wars is despicable.

I took a look at the state-by-state comparison of income taxes for 2008 by the Federation of Tax Administrators (they are not doing this comparison again until 2010). State income taxes range from no income tax in Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming to up to 9.5% in Vermont. At 3%, Illinois is right in the middle. Furthermore, income taxes have not been raised in Illinois in 20 years.

As much as I don't like the idea of paying more in the way of taxes and as much as I believe there are certainly areas in the State that could be run more efficiently and with less money, I also believe that we must take care of the least among us and the best way to do that is to protect human services. For those reasons, I encourage all of the legislators to quit balancing the budget on the poor and disabled and to vote for the tax increase and then get to work on finding areas to trim.

Does Nickelodeon Support Domestic Violence?

That title isn't meant to be funny. It's a question I'd really like to have answered. My gut says that Nickelodeon would say of course they don't condone violence against women (or anyone), but that doesn't really mesh with their decision to keep Chris Brown in contention to receive a Kids' Choice Award.

"Like all our KCA nominees, Chris Brown was nominated by kids several months ago based on his work as a performer, and the kids who vote will ultimately decide who wins in the category," Nickelodeon said in a statement sent to ABCNews.com.

19-year old Chris Brown, you'll recall is being charged with at least 1 felony for beating his 21-year old girlfriend Rihanna last month, although he's trying to plea to a misdameanor and not serve jail time.

I point out their ages because they are both role models to kids. Kids love them. Teenagers love their music. And of course, they are both still young adults themselves.

I'm all for being innocent until proven guilty, but this isn't about the court system. This is about what message is being sent to today's teenagers and pre-teens. Wrigley gum and the Milk campaign have decided they don't want to be associated with an alleged woman beater. Yet Nickelodeon, through their actions, is saying that his behavior is okay and they're standing by him. By doing that, they're sending the message to kids that it's okay to beat a woman to a bloody pulp.

It's bad enough that many of today's teens already think that Rihanna must be to blame for the beating she received from her boyfriend and that dating violence is normal. And this is at a time when 1 in 10 teens suffer violence in their dating relationships.

Don't we as adults owe it to this generation of teens and pre-teens to condemn domestic violence, let them know that violence is never okay, they deserve better, they must report it when it happens, and that they should not go back to the relationship?

Nickelodeon could use their Kids' Choice Awards as an opportunity to run anti-violence PSAs and educate kids about abuse. But it all starts with removing Chris Brown from contention for an award. It's too bad the powers that be at Nick are afraid to be adults.

Update 9:53pm: Campbell Brown of CNN has just weighed in on this issue and I'd like to think that she formed her opinion after reading Little Merry Sunshine, but I'm sure that's not true. But she does share my opinion. Watch for yourself.

Yet ANOTHER Side Effect of 8 Years of GOP Rule

I received this email today from Dan Seals, the Democratic Candidate for the 10th Congressional Seat in Illinois against 4 term incumbent and George Bush YES Man Mark Kirk. If this doesn't terrify you, well, then I'm not sure what to say. But it should. It should terrify you that if someone at the post office doesn't like you or your business, then your outgoing mail (that has cost you significant money to send) could just get misplaced. Of course, this comes just a month after Dan Seals campaign office was broken into and a computer was stolen. Coincidence?

This is definitely not the kind of America I want to live in. The only way I know to stop these nasty tactics is to vote all the Republicans out of office. That will send a very clear message that won't get "lost" at the Post Office.

Onto the email . . .

October 31, 2008

Dear Little Merry Sunshine,

ALERT
Last week, thousands of Seals supporters should have received our campaign's final direct mailing. Unfortunately, those letters were tampered with and never left the post office. Authorities are now investigating the situation, but we have already missed a critical opportunity to raise funds and keep Dan on the air in the final days of our campaign.

THE SITUATION
The campaign's final direct mail piece, which included a quote from Senator Barack Obama supporting Dan, was set to hit the mail boxes of thousands of supporters last week. The mail was received by the United States Post Office and then transferred that same day to a United States Post Office Distribution Center.

After realizing that supporters had not received the letter, we discovered that the mail had been set aside and out of sight at the post office. The letters were supposed to have been treated as first class mail. They were not.

CONSEQUENCES
We lost the money that we would have raised over the past week if the mailing had been delivered on schedule. With the election just days away, we need to raise money to keep Dan on air, in the third most expensive media market in the country, so that he can continue to communicate his positive message of change to every 10th district voter.

THE SOLUTION:
Please contribute to our campaign today and help us raise $10,000 by Midnight tonight. We had counted on these contributions and with only 4 days to go we cannot take a single dollar for granted.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

Team Seals

P.S. Help us raise the money we lost so Dan can reach every IL-10 voter before November 4.

Conversations I've Never Had With My Mother

As I was on my way home a few minutes ago, I stopped off to get gas. When I walked into the gas station, there was a girl standing at the counter who couldn't have been older than 18, flirting with the attendant and chatting on the phone with her mom, affording me the opportunity to overhear the following cell phone conversation:

Girl on the phone with her mom: Mom, you gotta let me borrow your car tonight to go see Becky.
Mom (I assume this is her response): No.
Girl: Aw, Mom, come on. What if I promise not to drive drunk?

At that point, I looked at the guy behind the counter who is just shaking his head. I have no idea how the conversation ended because by that time, I had my change, so I had no reason to stand around and eavesdrop.

I swear that's a conversation my mom and I have absolutely never had.

I'm Just Wondering . . .

John McCain has run his entire campaign on being a maverick and getting rid of earmarks. Does anyone need to hear that sorry bear DNA joke again - was it a paternity or criminal issue? He has repeatedly said that he will not sign any bills with earmarks and we will know their names.

No. More. Earmarks. Nada. None. Not ever.

Okay, that's cool.

But then tonight, he went and voted in favor of the Senate's bailout bill, estimated to cost $850 billion, an increase of $150 billion over the $700 billion bailout plan that failed in the House on Monday.

The extra $150 billion wasn't 3 days worth of inflation. As a matter of fact, that extra $150 billion is made up of "add ons" or "sweetners," which sound a lot like code words for "earmarks" or "pork" to me.*

So I'm wondering why John McCain, who is so vehemently opposed to these sorts of things would vote for a bill that includes $150 billion worth of them?

*Please don't misunderstand me, I'm in favor of parity for mental health insurance coverage, extending tax credits for solar energy (yeah for Dave and his business!), and increasing the FDIC insurance amount to $250,000, among other things. (link)

Dan Seals Waukegan Campaign Office Burglarized

From Ellen of the Tenth yesterday:

Someone broke into the Seals campaign office in Waukegan last night/early this morning (Sunday night/Monday morning). (News-Sun Story)

They tried to break down the back door, then they hurled something through the front and they robbed us. Police are currently looking for suspects.

As Pat Mogge, Dan's Campaign Manager, says, "For those who have never been to the office, this is where we welcome voters, launch canvassing drives, host phone banks, and hold forums."

It is a vital part of our efforts to engage and support a community that has had more than its fair share of challenges.

Front Door: $750
Security System & Camera Installation: $650
Security System for Six Weeks: $150
Laptops Purchased at Best Buy: $600 per laptop

We can donate here to help rebuild the Waukegan office.

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This is LMS talking . . . This is horrible. Truly horrible. I understand that in the whole scheme of things, like the economy, it's not so bad. But it is bad. Dan Seals is an upstanding citizen, working hard to make the world a better place than he found it. I'm voting for him and so should you, as I've expressed here. Who would do this? And why? I want to hope that it was just someone who saw a laptop through a window and thought it could be a way to make a quick buck. But maybe not.