Wonderland's New Poster Child
Am I just being melodramatic or do I have real cause for concern on this one?
A few months ago the frog-eyed Colleen handed me what appeared to be a disposable placemat. On one side was a giant display of the school's logo along with a sample of a student's writing. On the other side, low and behold, was a snapshot of yours truly. I didn't think much of it until tonight when I went out to a local bar. The owner, Mr. Chang, told me in his best English that he saw my picture on a, *insert finger symobols here, rectangle in the newspaper. I discerned from this communique that the placemats are being sold to newspapers as advertisement. This would be a logical explanation for the stacks upon stacks of the things that were delivered to the school sometime last week. Now I do not have a mathematical mind and I am by no means even remotely good at estimation, but I'm gonna say that there were approximately 500 flyers in a stack and probably 20-30 stacks in all. You do the math, because I certainly can't.
In case you haven't gathered from any of my previous posts or from personal contact with me, I do NOT like my place of employment. I hate the people for whom I work. I hate the school, I hate everything it DOESN'T stand for and everything it settles for, hell I even hate the colors. Given this, it is probably pretty safe to assume that the very last thing I would be down for would be acting as a poster child for such a business. The picture was taken on "picture day" and I was under the assumption that all photographs would be used for publishment in the yearbook and for the student's personal collection. I was never told that they would be used for advertisement purposes.
The school is a private institution and the pictures were taken on the school's property so I'm assuming that by signing the contract I am submitting myself to such possibilities. My query is whether or not it is totally beyond the realm of reason to have, at the very least, been told that my picture was going to be used for public advertisement purposes.
I know that the presence of native English speakers at a school is a huge draw and is a good excuse to jack up the tuition. Had I known that my picture would have been used for advertising I certainly would have done my best to...well, to sabotage the pictures. I would have forwent showers, put a pillow under my shirt, blacked out a couple of teeth and ensured that I had a tattoo of a purple triangle encircled by a rainbow visible to the camera lense prior to flashing a smile.
Your thoughts please....
posted by Mayzilla @ 1:44 AM
2 Comments:
...but you said she did show it to you. You really believed it was a placemat? Do you ever use placemats at the school that look like that?
Maybe the laws there are different (and if they are, I would think they are probably more lax) but generally as an employee you can be used for advertising without any kind of express consent or anything. Besides, she DID show you the "placemat" and you saw that there were thousands of them sitting around. You just gotta put two and two together sometimes, dummy.
-b
In a weird way, I suppose that it is flattering. They probably wanted to put the most Western, attractive-looking figure, that they could scrounge up, on their placemat. Since you have a certain amount of recognition factor among parents of potential pupils and restaurateurs, you could offer to do an even more splashy advertising campaign...for money or some other job-related consideration...or you could just ask them to not further use your image in their advertising, though I do not think that I would explain why....
I would certainly grab some of those placemats. They'll be great conversation pieces in another life.
D
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