Rick Noble shared this with me today at Rotary, from The Economist:
IT’S a great day in South Carolina, and if you don’t believe it, ask Governor Nikki Haley. On September 27th the governor ordered the 16 directors of cabinet agencies under her direct control to change the way their employees answer the telephone. So now when phoning, say, the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services or the Department of Employment and Workforce, callers are supposed to hear this cheery greeting: “It’s a great day in South Carolina. How may I help you?”
Ms Haley says the new greeting will boost the morale of state workers and help her to sell the state. “It’s part of who I am,” she declares. “As hokey as some people may think it is, I’m selling South Carolina as this great, new, positive state that everybody needs to look at.”
The blogosphere has been inundated with people mocking the new salutation and proposing alternative greetings. One suggestion: “It’s still better here than Mississippi. How can I help you?” Another was more explicit: “Thank you for calling South Carolina where unemployment is high, morale is low and political leaders are very busy wasting your resources. How may I direct your call?”…
Man, I miss reading The Economist. I used to get it at the paper. But I’m already paying for too much other stuff that used to be covered by the paper, so that’s fallen by the wayside. (Man what DID I spend my salary on back when my club memberships and subscriptions were paid for?)
I used to know the South Carolina writer who wrote for The Economist. I sort of see (or imagine I see — “That blame media is SO bah-ussed!”) her political views in the particular facts chosen in this brief piece — and they are not views that are consistent with those of the editors of The Economist. But I’m not going to name her, because it might be somebody else by now, and then I’d look stupid. Or rather, stupidER.
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I think maybe, when I get a minute, I’ll write a song, in the vein of “Surfin’ USA” or “Dancing in the Streets,” about all the places that are laughing at SC.
It would go something like (imagine the Chuck Berry tune):
“They’re laughing at us in Eng-land,
And Californ-I-ay,
They’re gettin’ tickled in Kan-sas,
at everything we say…”
Like it so far?