Last week, on a routine business flight to Chicago, I'm reading the most recent Wired (the one with Brad Pitt on the cover), and I'm interrupted by the flight attendant offering me a snack--a mini-can of Pringles.
I check the can's label and refuse politely. Holy Jeez--210 calories! That's more than 10% of my daily allowance! (Faithful FOPs know my obsession with fitness and health and trying desparately not to eat junk food...but I digress.)
I continue reading the mag, more specifically a piece about a Journal of Marketing Research study called "Remedying Hyperopia--The Effects of Self-Control Regret on Consumer Behavior" (nutshell summary: Regret over choosing the responsible alternative over the more hedonistic, selfish one diminishes over time)...
...and suddenly, we're hit by SEVERE TURBULENCE.For those of you who have never experienced the sensation of SEVERE TURBULENCE (and I know it was because the pilot descibed it as such), consider the plane to be a cocktail shaker, with you being an ice cube. The violent, successive 45-degree sikde-to-side flops of the plane whiplashed my neck to the point where I'm still dealing with a pinched nerve from my right shoulder up through my head.
While the whole thing only lasted about 30 seconds (cause: we were too close to the wake of a 767 ten miles in front of us), I truly thought--and probably said out loud--that the plane was going down, fast.
And the one thing that passed though my mind during that terrifying, bone-jarring, half-minute?
"Acchh...I should've had the Pringles."
There's a marketing message, and subsequent set of tactics, in there somewhere.
And as soon as this damn pain in my head goes away, I'm gonna concretize it...and bottle it.