when innovation goes wrong

Free gift … the ultimate bait to get more customers. That’s what I got when I bought 4 movie tickets on Friday. Free gifts. Nice isn’t it ? But no. Instead of feeling nice, the gift that I’ve got that night confuses me. Instead of getting nice free gifts like maybe an awesome pen, mobile phone strap or perhaps a nail clipper … I got 2 bars of soap. Soap ! Sabun !

Now, who in his right mind would have thought of giving out free soaps in cinema ? Well, maybe some desperate act of pushing out uncleared stocks perhaps. Ok, I might dig that. But then, it was not an ordinary soap that I’ve got there. The soap smelled kooky. I took a whiff at the soap … it smelled something like a canned fruit cocktail.

And when I took a more careful look at the soap wrapper, I saw a very disturbing picture of somekind of fruit. “Rambutan ! Oh my god !” Emily exclaimed hysterically. But no, it wasn’t rambutan. It’s LYCHEE ! A lychee scented soap ! (if you don’t know what a lychee is ..nevermind)

Why would anyone waste their money developing a LYCHEE SCENTED soap !? I mean, aren’t soaps suppose to smell nice .. so that when we finished cleaning our body with it, we wouldn’t reek of our own sweat and perspiration ? Now imagine that someone were to wash him/herself with a lychee scented soap and his/her friends complimented “Oooh … u smelled so … lychee ?” Add a bye behind the word if you like. Ridiculous .. isn’t it ?

Damn, it’s really a bad thing when innovation goes wrong. What next ? A belacan scented soap ? langsat scented soap ? I mean, why can’t they stick to old traditional nice flowery scents ? What’s wrong with it ?

And also, I never failed to notice is that we have “menthol” in almost all our daily products. People seems to like it a lot. Well, I like it too .. but only on certain products like toothpaste or maybe our good old hair shampoo…. until one day … I discovered that menthols had already started to invade our homes like housewives did.

It happened when I was scrubbing myself with a bottle free gift body shampoo as usual in the shower … and suddenly, I had the urge to defecate. I spent a good 1 minute over on the toilet bowl with unrinsed soap still all over my body … crapping my intestines out.

Then, I started to experience this ‘cool’ sensation down under my barn there … which became briskier as the time passes by… as if someone had poured ‘minyak cap kapak’ down there. Then, the cool feeling started to spread across my gooch into the chocolate cream dispenser orifice…. that I swear it made my shit lose it’s original distinctive fecal characteristics.

I had to actually wash off the soap immediately to rid of that sensation when it became ‘too cool to bear’. Later only I managed to find out that the body shampoo is actually mentholated.

So, basically, everyone had to accept the fact, that sooner in future, everything will be mentholated. We’re gonna have menthol on condoms, doctor’s anal examination gloves or even your broadband modem… just anything that you can imagine. And they probably will smell of lychee as well.