painfully good marketing or just painful?

Author: sean M Published: March 26, 2022 0 comments

so, i have a subscription to an underwear service…

…that’s not a joke. we’ll just chalk it up to intoxicated online bullshit. i’m honestly not sure how to cancel it, as somehow i don’t have a login or password, but i do have a recurring monthly charge and without the former i’m not sure how i cancel it?

anywho, on saturday i got an email that was loaded with their typical humor, but had the interesting subject line of “my upcoming urology appointment” and had this as the body:

Hi Dr. Shin,

Before I come in for my appointment next week I had a few questions for you:

This is the second kidney stone I’ve passed in the last year. Is this something that’s going to keep happening?
Are the frequent occurrences of blood in my urine a sign that another stone may be developing, or could this be unrelated?
Will you need to perform another cystoscopy? Of all the holes in my body, my urethra is definitely the one I don’t ever want to have a camera in again.

Also, I know you wanted me to bring in the stone so you could examine it, but I kind of want to keep it and put it in a little display case. Is that weird? I went through hell to pass that thing so I want to keep it around as a trophy.

I’ve attached a photo of my kidney stone to this email, so just let me know if that’s sufficient.

Thanks again for seeing me on such short notice.

Best,

Nate

this was followed, about EIGHT HOURS LATER, with an email entitled, “oops – my bad” but instead of being a retraction, it said:

Hey.

This is embarrassing. Clearly, I messed up that previous email. Sorry about that.

I said I was gonna attach a photo of my kidney stone and then forgot. My bad.

Here you go, Dr. Shin:

Note: I didn’t also pee out the penny, it’s just there for scale.

I’d love your insight on why half of it is smooth and half of it is jagged. Nothing about passing the stone felt smooth, I can tell you that much.

Let me know if you still need me to bring it to my appointment. The stone, I mean. I don’t know why you’d need to see the penny.

Best,

Nate

this was followed only about six minutes later with an email labeled “please ignore the previous two emails” and explained how he THOUGHT he was emailing his urologist (Dr Mark Shin) and instead sent this all to thousands of strangers as he only typed “dr-mark” thinking it would go to him but instead his gmail filled in “direct-marketing-list” for all the subscribers. he then goes on to apologize profusely and offers his personal discount code to spur some biz and hopefully save his job.

so – anybody think this was real?

painfully good marketing or just painful?

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