Health and safety warning

When you get to my age you have to keep a close eye on your health.

I think I go to no end of trouble – breathe on a mirror every morning to see if I’m still alive and so on – but my beloved is a bit sceptical about my casual approach.

That is why I am once again having a complete health check tomorrow – which takes a couple of hours and costs far too much money.

It also calls for me to supply faecal samples, suspended in a little plastic capsule of water.

I couldn’t believe what I read on the side of the bottle this morning, though. It said “Do not drink contents of bottle”.

Well, I like a drink as much as anyone – but really!

The people who write most of these warnings on packages clearly have shit for brains.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

6 Comments

  1. Rob Watson

    I think that even beats the one I saw recently on a bottle of pills for a dog, which said not to drive or operate heavy machinery.

    It’s amazing the things we seem to have to tell people NOT to do these days, that once would have been obvious.

    What next? Kitchen knives with a warning to say “do not plunge into your flesh”, or a car saying “do not drive on water”, or maybe they’ll start stamping new born babies with “fragile” or “this way up”?

  2. Blame this one on the lawyers, and people too lazy or greedy to think themselves accountable for their own stupidity.

    Litigating the ridiculous has become a national passtime here in the States, with no end in sight.

    I once heard from a businessman who made stepladders. He said he spent half his time defending his company against idiots in court, and the other half making up signs for every step on his ladders in a vain attempt to stave off more lawsuits.

    It started with a not-too-bright farmer who propped on of those ladders aginst his barn, and secured the bottom to a pile of frozen cow dung–which proceeded to melt as the sun came up, with predictable results. Gravity works.

    The farmer sued on the grounds the ladder company didn’t tell him NOT to foot the ladder in cow shit (frozen or not). He won.

    Makes you wonder if a countersuit might be in order–obviously, he was one of those babies that didn’t get “stamped,” which had tragic results…

    “Ladder company sues Farmer’s Mom for not having a safety warning TATTOOED TO HER SON’S FOREHEAD. Gravity worked, which resulted in his becoming a blithering idiot.”

  3. Anonymous

    The best one I have seen was on a supermarket salmon pack which said, ‘warning may contain fish’. At £5.99 for 3 slices lets hope it did contain fish!!
    Ginny

  4. There seems a belated but welcome trickle of comment on this loony subject. My latest example was in Wholefoods in Kensington High Street last week: “may contain traces of nuts” – on a bag of nuts. Amazing. I suspect the firms who print this kind of thing may contain traces of morons.

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