“I’ve got a great idea!”, said the Art Director of a candy firm I worked for regularly. “For our Company Christmas card let’s put a candle in each of the chocolate bars coming down the conveyor belt!”
Naturally I agreed enthusiastically – all work is welcome even if it does sound a bit harebrained, plus the fact that if it looked good then I would get some nice publicity out of it. We went through the logistics of finding a time when the line wasn’t in production and organizing everything we needed. We decided to do it with the conveyor belt stationary and carefully lined up all the candy bars with their candles and arranged the lights and camera.
Then came the moment to light them.
“Oh no, my lighter’s out of gas, we’ll use matches”,
“We need more matches to get round all the bars”,
“The candles at the front are burning down too fast before we get the back ones lit”,
“We need more people to light all the candles together”,
“The chocolate is melting!”
Finally we had all the candles lit quickly on pristine bars and it looked good…for a moment…
“There’s a lot of smoke, the photo is going to be hazy”,
“Hang on, did anyone make sure the Fire Alarm was turned off?”
“Oh no (expletives deleted)!” As the Fire Alarm duly went off.
“Someone turn the alarm off and tell the Fire Brigade it’s a false alarm!”
Eventually we got the photos and after processing I sent them to the Art Director who was very pleased with the results.
The week after I had a call from a very annoyed Art Director who said,
“We can’t use the photo for the card, Quality Control went bananas and told me the implication is that there’s foreign objects in the bars, Health and Safety said that the company fire insurance would double if that photo was released and Advertising said that if it was shown all the customers would expect a candle on their chocolate bar!”
