I was rushing to the airport when the courier chap caught me and handed over a couple of attractive red boxes from Vodafone. The box was fairly large and had a nice heft to it and the bunch of us in the car played a guessing game about its contents. I briefly fantasised that Vodafone, having mysteriously found out that I had dropped my cell phone so many times that deep cellular damage had occurred, had understandingly sent me a couple of free phones as a freebie. My colleagues snorted at my naïveté and prophesied it would be a clock. Or a torch. Or some other quasi-useful gizmo.
Anyway, to cut the suspense short, I tore open the box with all the weary boredom of a jaded kid getting yetanotherone birthday present – and we all gazed in to see who was right. Let me put it this way — we were all gobsmacked. Nestled inside was a pig. Yup. A pig. About five inches long and three inches wide, if my spatial memory serves me right. A pig with a blackened mouth, pretty heavy at that, made of some sort of resin. And if an ugly pig wasn’t mystery enough, the pig had, on its back, a small hole and impaled in that was something that looked like a grenade pin. The pig was relayed around the car in a quick pass-the-parcel game and the conversation segued into what this thing could possibly be.
“A keychain for a giant key,” someone suggested. But even if you had been able to lug this around in your handbag, that surmise was shot to pieces by the fact that the pin fell out. With no damage or shrapnel, I hasten to add … it merely looked like a grenade pin. Someone picked up the strange pin with this circular end and peered through it. “Hmm, this is a clue,” she said, “If we can figure out what this is, we will figure out the pig-thingy. Maybe you can use it to keep notes – if you ran out of Post-its, you could pierce a note and pin it onto the pig.” Someone else thought it was some sort of stress-buster – slide your finger in and twirl the pig and gave this a try. The pin shot out and the pig flew, almost braining the driver. “See, you have two of them,” I was told, “Maybe they will send you another one and then you will have the full cast for a fairy tale enactment.”
It was all most intriguing but I wasn’t happy at the thought of lugging this hefty animal around with me so I was about to jettison the mysterious pig in the taxi. But the guessing game wasn’t over and I was exhorted by my bunch of mystified friends that I simply had to take it along for the flight. Alas, the security chaps were a bit startled when the pig showed up in all its porcine glory, the odd pin outlined nicely in the scan. The bag was unzipped and the security guy took it out gingerly and nervously pulled the grenade pin, all the while giving me gimlet glances which quite unnerved me. “What is this?,” he asked, suspiciously. I searched wildly for an answer and came up with “A toy”, stopping myself at the last minute from saying, “Du-uh, I don’t know”. It would too tragicomic, I thought, if I was arrested or shot on suspicion for a pig-thing, the identity of which I have no clue. Luckily the grenade-pin came out smoothly and he relaxed. Not to the extent of letting me take it on the flight, however. He weighed it in his hand and did a couple of reflective bicep-curls and then pronounced that it was a danger and I had to either check it in or junk it. Maybe he thought I would threaten to fling it at the pilot or maybe he thought I would use the grenade pin as a dangerously sharp instrument … whatever, I didn’t pause to find out. I abandoned the pig with a strange sense of relief and loss.
The mystery continued to seize us, however, and grew into an outsized mental itch that refused to go away. I caved in to peer pressure and called a knowledgeable friend. The minute I mentioned pig-grenade she burst into loud cackles and said, “Silly, that is not a pig, it is a pug”.
Oh.
“And that’s not a grenade pin, it is a card-holder.
Oh.
“Hmm, so why are they sending me one of the worst-looking-pig-pugs I have had the misfortune to set my eyes on and why do I need a cardholder?” I asked belligerently?
“To put your visiting card in,” said my friend, patiently, when she had mopped her eyes dry. “And what do I do with that?” I asked, still foxed. “Keep it on your desk,” she said, helpfully. I relayed this information to my eagerly waiting group and after stunned silence, the burst of mirth that erupted earned us some more suspicious glances.
Now here’s a newsflash – I know who I am – I don’t need a pig-pug on my desk, carrying my card on its back like a paper howdah to remind me of my identity. So the mystery continued. Who would need a thing like this? Maybe if you were a frontline staff at a hotel or a bank? Then a customer would figure out who you were and could read out your name, assuming the customer was not discombobulated into speechless horror at the sight of the pig-pug. That is a possibility, I suppose. But why Vodafone should assume that most of its customers are frontline staff is another mystery, which I have no energy to delve into.
I still have no idea where this pig-pug promo fits into the marketing strategy. I could call and ask my friend more details into this mystery. But guess what, ever since I moved into this high-rise in Bangalore, my cell signal is … shall we say … a tad erratic. I find that if I lean out of the window at a particular spot, and hold my head in a spondylosis-inducing angle, then the signal works. If I move my head ever so slightly, or do this teeny-weeny shift in my stance, the call drops. For a while, most of my conversations had long patches of silence from my end which earned me huge undeserved compliments of being an excellent listener, till everyone caught on. The loss of signal makes the whole “wherever you go” tagline rather ironic, I suppose, but that’s another story.
Maybe the parcel should’ve come with an instruction manual explaining what it was supposed to be. On the other hand, we might not have had so much fun. Maybe, even as I write, there are Vodafone customers all over the city (the ones who know who they are and who are not frontline staff) playing “guess what the pig is” games, whiling away the time as they wait for a signal to materialise. Or maybe it really is a stress-busting device –I could drop it and stomp on it each time the call drops and that would make me feel so much better that I might not even complain, thus taking the load off the call centres – oh, but I can’t get through anyway, because of the no-signal issue, remember? Sadly, I am now bereft of my pig-pug – by the end of the saga I had become almost fond of its ugly face. I suspect I might have enjoyed having it around to remind me of the unintended hilarity caused by an incredibly weird promo, but that’s life. Somewhere in the garbage heap of the airport sleeps a forlorn pig-pug with (or without) a pin in its back. Goodbye pig-pug.
(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and the co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd. )
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