During my time at Volvo’s UK headquarters in Duxford, I was part of a high-pressure team tasked with redesigning the global corporate website. One morning, in our hushed, open-plan office, I prepared to pull up the live site at volvo.com for a quick reference check. My fingers flew across the keys, but just as I hit "Enter," a phone call distracted me.
I looked away to answer, leaving the page to load in full view of the room. A few seconds later, my colleague Andre Pocock leaned over, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.
"My goodness, Graeme," he hissed, "what on earth are you looking at?"
I turned back to my screen and felt a jolt of pure, corporate-grade horror. Instead of the safe, Swedish lines of a family station wagon, I was staring at a giant, high-definition, and very explicit anatomical image.
In my distracted state, my fingers had betrayed me. I hadn't typed the home of the "Iron Mark"; I had swapped the two vowels in volvo with other letters and navigated directly to a site that was much more "biological" than "automotive."
The contrast between Volvo’s brand values and the screen in front of me was absolute. I managed to kill the window before the rest of the department could wander over, but for the rest of my tenure, I never hit the "Enter" key again without the realization that you can't navigate life—or the internet—without a great deal of care.
0 comments:
Post a Comment