10 GOTO 20. 20 GOTO 20. 30 DANG.
Where: Lowe's, 1659 W Foothill, Upland, CA 91786
When (GMT): Saturday, 18 February, 2006, 2320
Have you heard of Amazing Goop? It's a handy dandy contact adhesive & sealant that bonds whatever forever. There are Amazing Goop formulations for lawn & garden, household, plumbing, wood & furniture, and marine (no, not the soldiers).
But perhaps you're visiting a home improvement store and can't really understand much of what I'm saying here. Why? Because your native language is Spanish, and you have not become suitably proficient in English to understand complex marketing materials. Well, the Amazing Goop people are ready to help - their brochures are bilingual.
But perhaps their brochures need a little bit of help.
One side of the brochure is almost entirely in Spanish, and instead of referring to lawn & garden and the like, it refers to "Césped y jardín," "Hogar," "Plomería," "Madera y Muebles," and "Marina" (no, not the place where the Minnesota Vikings get ready to party). But, in case an Anglo looks at that side of the brochure, the following helpful information appears at the bottom:
Please see other side for English
So people like me who are Spanish-challenged will know to flip the brochure over to find something that we are capable of reading.
But what if it's the other way around, and a Spanish speaker grabs the English side of the brochure? Well, the Amazing Goopers are ready for that eventuality also...sort of. At the bottom of the English text, the following message appears:
Vea por favor otro lado para el inglés.
In other words, the Spanish-speaking readers of the English side of the brochure are being told to please view the other side for the...English text.
Oops.
But at least their English seems to be OK, so I visited their website (which has no Spanish text, by the way). While looking at the FAQs, I learned that there is something more powerful than Amazing Goop:
Don’t use Amazing Goop on your dry cleaning. The dry cleaning solvent breaks down the adhesive.
Lora isn't a fan:
I thought I was being all cute and resourceful by going out to my car and getting my wrench in order to open this stupid tube of "Amazing Goop", but it's still not working. Damn goop and its amazing-ness. Maybe pliers were a better idea. How is that a woman such as myself finds herself without duct tape? I can't believe I let this happen. Arg. Now I'll never fix this whole [sic] in my air mattress. (Yes, another hole. Also another air mattress.)
Lora, Lora, Lora. Did you send your air mattress to the dry cleaners? No haga eso.
Postscript to those who could decipher the title: I learned my BASIC programming back in the 1970s, and was surprised to learn by the late 1980s that line numbers were no longer required. So call me old fashioned.
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