No doubt, those of you who read my blog know that I play classical piano – that I take piano lessons from Dr. Kaizer at Bradley University and that I teach piano. With spring comes my quarterly advertisement in the local paper to secure a few more students to offset the attrition that is certain to occur with young students. Up until this point, my dealings with our local paper, The Chillicothe Independent, have been agreeable, affordable and have brought at least a few students in.

Then the spring rolled around.

My ad that I place reads like this:

Simple enough, right? Apparently not.

Last Christmas they had issues with the period. So this year I made sure to indicate where I wanted the period to go. I guess my mistake (although it was successful in the past) was that I placed the ad via telephone instead of delivering it, handwritten, to the office.

Last week my ad looked like this:

Anyone else see the issue in this? Hi2u I r a netspek kid what tchs pino in Chilli. Seriously, I was furious. I called the paper as soon as I saw the ad and told the woman that the number 4 should not be there and F – O – R should take it’s place. I spelled it out to her, people.

So yesterday, I opened up the paper hoping that this time they finally got it right. This is what I saw:

I’m speechless, people. It’s bad enough that these horrible ads look far from professional, but I’m not getting any phone calls – not even a bite. Granted this could be because people are not interested in signing up for lessons, or maybe, just maybe, the sheer stupidity of these ads is making people shake their heads and wonder what the hell is going on.

So today I am walking the written ad down to the paper, suggesting a cooling off period of 2 weeks before it is run again, and I am not paying for the last two weeks of insane stupidity.

Although I’m half-tempted to make a phone call again just to see if next week we can use the word “fore”.