ADPR 5990: Copywriting, Fall 2023

  One of the weird things about working in customer service is that sometimes people will casually drop the most appalling or intimate things while talking to you. I’ve worked in some form of customer service now for about six years, and it never ceases to amaze me that people will just tell you super personal things about themselves before disappearing out into the ether again. When I was in high school I started working at a coffee shop, a big corporate one rather than a cute mom-and-pop shop. The company’s mission was often marred by a “the customer is always right, no matter what, even if the world is falling apart” attitude, which led to a lot of disputes between customers and my fellow baristas, who were just trying to get through the day. Little things like whether the mocha syrup should go in before the hazelnut syrup before it was mixed, demands that a latte wasn’t exactly 110 degrees, all of these compounded into an emotionally laborious workplace. Not only were we bari...

  and I, who was chosen by him. I've never been the best at naming things. Take, for example, my pet goldfish, Goldie, who was named after the color of his scales. Or maybe my teddy bear Lake Tahoe, who was named after his place of origin and the letters stitched onto his round belly. I guess, then, it would be more accurate to say that I name things by the first word that comes to mind, especially when it comes to inanimate objects. Sometimes that's their color. Sometimes that's their origin. The most creative I've ever gotten was when I was in my food phase, where I had an entire line of dolls named things like Biscuit, Vanilla, Butterscotch, or Cinnamon. One of my dolls was named  Harrod . Harrod was named after the words printed on his light emerald-colored ribbon. He's a very plain bear; in fact, he's probably the most teddy-bearish teddy-bear I own. But despite his ordinary appearance, I loved Harrod. Why I loved Harrod so much is a mystery. All I know is ...

 Visiting my grandmother in Georgia meant going with her to the furniture store where she worked. My brother and sister and I loved to roam the showroom and look at all the new furniture, grouped as if in rooms throughout the display area. We liked to decide what pieces we liked best, what we would buy if we were rich, and how we would decorate our dream houses.    Then, when it was time to open the store, my grandma would get us situated in the back room so she could talk to customers. The back room was not as nice at the showroom. It was home to the furniture they hadn’t sold and couldn’t sell. It was a last stop for old and hideous couches. Most of these couches had been on sale for years and still hadn’t been snatched up: hideous, scratchy fabrics that not even livestock would have been interested in lounging on, foul studies in Naugahyde, patterns that looked like some mutant animal had been killed for its lurid pelt.     The tables in the back room we...