Tag: contact

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Having No Mobile Signal is Worse Than A Zombie Apocalypse

Needless to say, it’s only a matter of time before the zombie apocalypse (I’m guestimating at around three to four years) but a world populated with angry, brain-obsessed shufflers needn’t be the end of the world (although that’s pretty much exactly what it is). There are plenty of things that are more of a hindrance than those stupid slow-coach zombies – such as having no mobile phone signal. Let’s take a look at the most obvious 7 Reasons (there are hundreds to choose from) that a having no mobile signal is, in fact, considerably worse than a world beset by grey-matter gobblers:

1. Inconvenience. Just imagine how angry you’re going to be when you get home from the pub, filled with Guinness (there are other beers available. They’re just not as nice) and you have a craving for a pizza. You whip out your mobile phone to ring the local Papa Johns and, lo-and-behold, no phone signal! Call me crazy but, in my book, this is much more of an inconvenience than having some undead chap shuffling after you trying to get their takeaway of choice i.e. brains.

2. Social Media. Picture this – you’re being chased by a zombie and the poor unfortunate ghoul trips over whilst he is chasing you. How annoying would it be not being able to upload “LOL – Epic Zombie Fail. Tripped Over…” as your Facebook Status because your phone has no signal. That, my friends, is a world not worth thinking about.

3. Popularity. If you’re anything like me, your mobile phone will constantly be ringing off the hook with requests to go to fun social events or just out to the pub but ever since I’ve moved to an area with no mobile phone signal, I’ve not being get such invites. I didn’t get them before either but there must have been some other reason for that. At least, with the zombie apocalypse, you can try and befriend some of the less “bitey” ones.

4. Emergencies. Needless to say, in a world ravaged by zombies, you’re probably going to have to ring the emergency services from time to time with issues such as:

999 Operator: 999, what’s your emergency?

You: Errrrm, yeah, so there’s a zombie eating my Shih Tzu.

999 Operator: That, sir, is not an emergency. Goodbye.

Or something like that.

5. Pranks. Obviously, the mobile phone is integral to many pranks and if you’re unfortunate enough to live in an area which is utterly bereft of phone signal, your pranking capabilities will be severely inhibited. Having zombies clawing at your door will obviously be a bit annoying that but an inability to phone up the local takeaway restaurant with the name Joe Mama is patently much, much worse.

6. Boredom. As you may have noticed, people are now more or less tethered to their smartphones and it could be potentially difficult to spot the normal from the zombies in this post-apocalyptic world as we’re slaves to our phones and they’re slaves to their insatiable desire to chow down on brains. Without our phones, our propensity to get bored increases significantly and this, my friends, is another reason that having no phone signal is worse than a zombie apocalypse.

7. Parents. Even if there’s a zombie apocalypse, your parents are going to still be sitting at home wondering why you’re not calling them. If you live in a mobile phone area with no reception you can use that as an excuse for not calling but a zombie apocalypse? No, that won’t fly with the old parental units. They’ll want their Sunday phone call still.

Have you got concerns about an impending zombie apocalypse? Rightly so. It prepares to be ready for such an eventuality so you can sort out your mobile phone receptions problems with a LiGo BlueWave Mobile Hub which will get rid of those pesky “dead-spots” for mobile phone signal. You can find this product online at LiGo Cordless Phones.

February 27, 2013
7 Reasons Not To Have A Contact Form On Your Website

Okay, up above these words in the menu bar, there’s a page called Contact Us, and we’re beginning to believe that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. In fact, we’re beginning to think we should get rid of it altogether, and we’re coming round to the view that everyone else should too. Now we’re not self-appointed web experts or internet gurus; we’re humourists. If you have a website yourself, we can only advise you to free yourself from the tyranny of the contact form based on our own experience. And, from our experience of having one of the damned things, here are seven reasons to get rid of it.

1. You’ll Have A More Manageable Penis. One of the most frequent things that people use the contact form for is to attempt to sell us penis enlargement pills. And by frequent, I mean we get a lot of penis enlargement offers. In fact, if we don’t visit our inbox for a while it ends up chock-full of enlarged penises. We aren’t really interested in any of these offers (I have a child now, so I probably won’t even need mine for the next eighteen years or so), but it’s a lot of stuff to wade through and ignore. Well, I say ignore, I’m assuming that my writing partner Jon’s ignoring them too. Perhaps he isn’t, though. Perhaps Jon’s buying penis enlargement pills from everyone that’s offering them. It could be that since we’ve been running 7 Reasons, Jon has purchased so many of these pills that his penis has become a major Kent landmark. Maybe ruddy-faced locals in smocks are staring at his chemically-enhanced appendage right now and pointing up at it with awe. Perhaps it’s on Google Earth. Who knows? One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a major hazard to air travellers as the other thing we get offered almost every day is Viagra.

2. You’ll Get To Read Less Gibberish. When the contact form isn’t trying to enlarge our penises, it sends other stuff too. It sends gibberish. Most things containing the subject heading “7 Reasons Contact Form” look like someone just pressed many keys at once. Frequently, we get the message that “sdkjfkl;sdfjsjsdk;” wrote “sjklsdhfkjsdhfjksdfhsjdfhjlksfsdhthurthw”. This is not helpful. In fact, it’s quite scary that “mgklksfdlgjkhg” writes “mxvnbcxn,bvcxb,mvxc” and “hytfhtyhtfyh” writes “vbnmbmnmbnm” on such a regular basis. Our contact page is fairly dull, but it’s not soporific enough to make this many people doze off on their keyboards while they’re reading it. So perhaps this is just the law of averages. Perhaps one person a day actually falls down dead while looking at our contact form. They’re probably dying when they’re reading other posts too, it’s just that we won’t get to know about that. 7 Reasons could be killing them in their droves: We might be the greatest practitioners of genocide since Pol Pot*. Either that, or – I don’t know – but we only get stuff like this from the contact form, not via email or our comments section.

3. Your Life Will Contain Less Mystery. This morning, via the contact form, we received this question: “When does it start airing?” That’s it. That’s the entire message. But what does it even mean? When does what start airing? Is this an enquiry about my laundry? Is this an enquiry about Jon’s penis? 7 Reasons: The Panel Show? Who knows? Certainly not me, and I don’t want to wake up to a mystery of a morning; I’m not Quincy. I just want to wake up to find that it isn’t raining and that there are coffee beans in the house. I would be able to do that if it weren’t for the contact form.

4. Your Messages Will Go To The Right Person. Above our contact form we clearly direct people that wish to write for us to a different page containing a dedicated email address for guest post submissions. This is a (vain) attempt to try to limit the number of identical submissions we receive about car insurance (purportedly all from different people) and to get them sent directly to Jon – who’s in charge of guest post submissions – rather than to me. He’s more patient than I am. He’s calmer than I am. On receiving his ninth identical offer of a car insurance post in a day, Jon’s veins bulge, he turns red, he emits a sound that is part scream, part bellow and part mating call of a rhinoceros and begins to punch the nearest table or wall. I, on the other hand, don’t take receiving them nearly as well. So there’s no likelihood of these things getting used and we just end up getting rather worked up when we receive them. Well, I do.

5. You’ll Feel Better About Yourself. This is from the contact form:

***** wrote:

Hi

My name is *****.

I would like to ask you if its possible to buy the picture of the lemons in a

high resolution (300ppi 160mm x 200 mm).

And if you have it form a other place can you tell me where?

Greetings *****

This refers to a picture of lemons that – in the same way that approximately 99.99999999% of websites source their pictures – we got from Google Images. There’s no way of replying to this person (that amazingly managed to give us their own name three times during the course of a tiny message) without sounding sarcastic. “Dear *****, we did get it from another place. It is available here. Yours sincerely, the 7 Reasons team” would make us look rather mean.

We’ve also received this:

Do you stock a Thermos type water jug to use on invalids bedside, I can’t find one in cataloues.

That’s just heart-breaking. Could we, in all conscience, send a reply saying “sorry, as a humour website we carry no stock of thermal water jugs, could we tempt you with a mildly Francophobic t-shirt?” No. Of course not. So we either have to spend our time researching random queries from confused people or feel really bad about ourselves.

6. You’ll Hear Less About The Colour Of Hats. The other thing we frequently receive via the cursed contact form are offers of help. Technical help. Traffic driving help. Messages that variously offer to help us “engage strategic initiatives”, “harness value-added solutions”, “integrate visionary partnerships” and “orchestrate bricks-and-clicks infomediaries”. A recent message discoursed for so long about white hat SEO, black hat SEO and grey hat SEO that I almost lost the will to live and – had I been viewing the contact form – I would have been in danger of sending myself a gibberish message with my face. As it was, I began to think about purchasing a hat. What I wasn’t thinking about was taking anyone up on their kind offer to improve our website with their baffling and incomprehensible gobbledygook.

7. You’ll Receive A Better Standard Of Correspondence. Groucho Marx brilliantly and wittily advocated exclusivity when he famously said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, and this can be applied to the Contact Form too. Because the contact form makes us too accessible. It’s too easy to get in touch with us. If it were more difficult to get hold of us, then we’d get a better class of correspondence, because the act of having to do a tiny bit of research to find our contact details and paste them into an email program could well cut out the spammers and raise standards. Perhaps the extra time and effort that this will take will cause people to reflect on whether they really need to contact us at all.

It boils down to this: If you have a contact form, it’s a magnet for spam in all its forms: penis-related-spam; gibberish-spam; spam that consists of bizarre utterances from the mad; spam that shouldn’t even be going to you; spam that is just flabbergasting or heartrending in its naivety; spam about hats. The one thing we rarely receive from the contact us form is any sort of meaningful correspondence. That all comes via email or Twitter. We’re going to be brave; we’re going to be bold: We’ve looked at the correspondence we receive via our contact form, and we’re going to disable it. And if you have a website that has one, we recommend you go back through your inbox and have a look at how much worthwhile correspondence you’ve received through it. We’re guessing it’s not as much as you think.

*The level of interest in our latest competition bears this out.

July 18, 2011
7 Reasons We Will Not Publish Your Guest Post

This is not your usual midweek post. It’s more the kind of topic you would expect to read on Russian Roulette Sunday. Unfortunately, we just can’t wait until Sunday. This needs to be addressed right now. Before something really bad happens.

We don’t like to brag, but we get a lot of guest post enquiries. So much so that neither of us have had to make up an imaginary US-based doctor who likes paragliding for a long time now. The enquiries we receive generally tell us a lot about a person. And they tell us a lot about what we might see in a submission. For the last eighteen months we have made it our duty to respond to every single enquiry. Sometimes about two weeks late, but we do respond. The time has now come that this must end. Replying to enquiries such as the one below is a complete waste of time. A bad enquiry will almost always lead to a bad submission.

The following email has been received a number of times, from a number of different people. It’s a template. Templates are bad. If you want to write for 7 Reasons, never ever use a template. Here’s why:

Dear Editor of “7reasons.org“

1. Greeting. We’re not so wrapped up in self-love that we expect every single guest post enquiry to come from a regular 7 Reasons reader. As such we don’t expect the author to know the trials and tribulations of our lives – that we so aptly share on a daily basis. We would have thought, however, that if you were really keen to write for 7 Reasons, you’d at least have done a bit of research. Just maybe to find out who to address an email to. It’s really not that hard. We have a useful ‘About Us’ page and a very helpful ‘Contact Us’ page. Even if all you do is read the ‘Write For Us’ page, logic would surely dictate that writing Dear The Team sounds so much better than Dear Editor of 7Reasons.org. We’re not feeling the love with that.

I enjoyed 7reasons.org and found it very interesting. The language used here is very easy to understand and in good language.

2. Charm Offensive Fail. This is patronising and doesn’t make sense. “The language used here is very easy to understand,” because we can write in sentences you mean? And what does, “in good language” mean? If you’d written, “in a good language” then at least we’d have known you rate English above French, but just to say, “in good language” is completely bemusing. Not even Marc’s enigma machine could decipher it.

So I was wondering if you would be posting more articles on Contact Lenses(including brands & types etc.) if so then I would like to be considered as guest writer for your site. I would love to write on Contact Lenses for about 350 to 400 words.

3. We’re A Website. This is good, referencing previous posts makes us think you might just know what we’re about. But then you go and spoil it by suggesting you want to write “on contact lenses”. What sort of pen writes on a contact lens? Given that you’ll probably be able to fit a maximum of one word onto a contact lens, that’s a minimum of 350 to 400 contact lenses too. And one other thing. We’re a bloody website. Do we look like we accept submissions written on eyewear?

The article will be exclusively written for your site and will be unique. And will not be published anywhere else.

4. Doubtful. That’s nice. Unfortunately, we’re not sure whether we believe you. The enquiry template you have used is far from unique. How do we know you haven’t got a 7 Reasons template?

Thus resulting in majority of bangs to your site.

5. Bangs! Excuse me? Between us we have over twenty years of experience using the internet. And we are pretty adept at it. We know about the front and back ends and we know that in worldwide web parlance a cookie is not something you can eat. What we have never come across though is the term ‘bangs’. We assume it means ‘hits’. But even then why are we only getting the majority? Where are the minority going?

In return I would only accept an in link to my webpage.

6. Demands. That’s a shame because we were going to offer you an elephant on a unicycle. We suspect you mean you’d like a link to your site somewhere in the post, but again, to get on 7 Reasons, it helps if you can write.

Please let me know if you would be interested in allowing us to write a post for 7reasons.org.

7. Snarky. Are we interested in giving you permission to write for us? The whole ‘Write For Us’ page really indicates that you have permission to do that. It also, for those in doubt, indicates that we are interested in receiving guest posts. Perhaps our ‘Write For Us’ page isn’t clear enough for you? Or perhaps you’re just a plank? The thing is, we know what you mean here, but you’ve irritated us so much in the rest of your email that now we are just in the mood to be awkward. Don’t give us the excuse next time.

So, in conclusion, if you wish to write for 7 Reasons do your research and make sure you can write. We won’t tell you again.

May 26, 2011
7 Reasons We Shouldn’t Try To Contact Aliens

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). For half a century mankind has been broadcasting into space, trying to contact extraterrestrial life forms. Is it really a good idea to get in touch with aliens though? Here are seven reasons that we shouldn’t.

1. Size. Jimi Hendrix once said that he believed that aliens could be enormous, and that we would be like ants to them. As he put it, “You wouldn’t go miles out of your way to step on an ant-hill”. What if our communications are annoying them though? You wouldn’t go miles to tread on ants, but you might cross the living room to swat a buzzing fly.

2. Evolution. What if the aliens have evolved differently to us? What if they’ve evolved from insects or snakes? What if they have feelers on top of their bulbous heads? What if they’re descended from ear-wax? We’d find them repellent, that’s what. What if they came to visit us and they turned out to be 15 feet high spiders? Half of the world’s population would scream “Kill it! Kill it!” and the other half would take one look at them and think “Not bloody likely”. Do we even have a giant shoe?

3. Disease. Aliens are…well, alien. Humans would have no immunity to any diseases or infections that they would bring, and they would have none to ours. We won’t be able to cope with Venusian Flu of the eye and they won’t be able to cope with Herpes of the tentacle. Meeting aliens would be a bad idea for all concerned.

4. Dullness. What if the aliens are uncharismatic? Really boring? Catatonically, mind-numbingly, vapidly, monotonously Daily Mail dull? Do we really want to have an unimaginative dialogue with dreary spacemen? What if they’re like Vogons?

5. Defeat. What if the aliens are more powerful and more advanced than us? We can’t know that they’re not war-like and intent on universal domination. By trying to contact the aliens we could be guaranteeing ourselves a new world order. We could only hope that our new alien masters would be benevolent. Perhaps they’d be a bit subtler than going for out-and-out enslavement, preferring to conquer and rule us – they might even settle for a puppet-government. To head this, they would need to find someone innocuous and popular, with a good grasp of modern communication, whose covetousness and vanity would leave him open to their manipulation. Our new alien-overlords would probably install Richard Bacon as Earth’s puppet-leader. No one wants that – even him.

6. Beggars. Why would aliens want anything to do with us anyway? If they’re in any way more advanced than us we’d drive them round the bend. Whether It’s pestering them for technology to save our ailing planet, pestering them for accommodation when we realise that we can’t or pestering them to take David Gest back, we’ll be, at best, a nuisance, and at worst, a burden. We’re like the annoying neighbour that you try to avoid by pretending to be out. The aliens – if they have any sense – are hiding from us.

7. Madness. What if there are no aliens? Then the whole SETI programme will have been in vain. If there are no aliens out there then essentially we’re talking to ourselves. I’ve seen people that do that out on the street. They look a bit foolish and they say the silliest things – often about spacemen, ironically.

********************UPDATE********************

Since we wrote this article, Stephen Hawking has come out and stated his opinion on this subject. He agrees with us. We don’t know if he read this piece first or eventually – after considering these issues for a good while longer than we did – came to a similar conclusion by himself. We like to think that it’s the former.

January 29, 2010