Are you kidding me, Saturn?

I love Saturn. Really. You'll recall that one of their vehicles kept me and my wife alive recently. But the company just did something odd.

I got a package in the mail thanking me for my purchase of my Saturn Greenline Vue. Now, for those of you recent readers to this blog (uh huh) I should mention a few things. First, the Greenline is Saturn's hybrid, more environmentally friendly car. The second is that I owned one, and it was destroyed in said car accident above, repaired by a body shop, and then sold.

Back to the story. So I get a package from Saturn which includes information on my OnStar service (the ninth time they've sent me info on the service) and a glossy brochure about the environmentally friendly Vue. Let me say that again—a glossy brochure about my environmentally friendly car. Two pages of hard card stock, gloss coated. Sixteen pages of internal high gloss stock. Blow in card. Nary a "this document was printed using soy inks on recycled paper" statement anywhere.

This document was then enclosed in a large high-gloss printed folder/mailer, which was then delivered (we presume) directly to a post office with many many others of these. The post office then proceeded to drive the mailer to each and every recipient in a non-hybrid vehicle.

Somewhere at Saturn, someone had the idea of producing the least possible environmentally friendly "welcome" package and delivering it to their environmentally conscious customers in the least environmentally friendly delivery system imaginable. And someone else approved it, signed off on the budget and had a lot of people oversee it.

Awesome.

But it gets better. Inside this package is "a special gift" just for me. Usually I directly throw out/recyle mail that tells me there's a free gift inside. Aside from cash or plane tickets to a Caribbean island, there's not much I can do with what you can fit inside an envelope and call a "gift". But, since I wanted to se what was inside this "welcome" package, I decided to open it up.

Imagine my surprise when I found that the "gift" is a spare key to the car I no longer own. That's right, they sent me another copy of my key inside a nice little rubber wallet-sized holder. Only, as I'm no longer the owner of demolished/rebuilt/sold Saturn, I now have the key to someone else's car.

Of course, even if this package included the key to my vehicle, I'd still be a bit miffed now as I previously mentioned that I throw away these packages, and because this package was sitting on the porch outside my house until we grabbed the mail today.

Attention thieves: Saturn mails spare keys to the cars sitting in driveways all over the country! All you have to do is wait until someone gets a new Saturn, and check their mail regularly. Sooner or later, you'll be able to drive away with a brand new car!

Comments

[matt]

HAHAHA this was hilarious David! I really can't believe that in this day and age they didn't see the irony is being green and spending green on excessive marketing materials :)

(as a sidenote, most inks these days are actually soy-based as they are cheaper for the printers, and that glossy coating was most likely an aqueous coating which is better than UV gloss as it's water based. Ok, I'm REALLLLLLY giving Saturn the benefit of the doubt here, ain't I?)