Insider: Booze ruse
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One New Zealand company hopes to use the power of alcohol in order to retrieve...
“Here’s to alcohol,” the beer-guzzling cartoon character, Homer Simpson, remarked in one episode of the Simpsons, “the cause of – and solution to – all of life’s problems.” Laptop loss, it seems, is the one exception, however.
Tales of corporate laptops mysteriously disappearing after a heavy night on the tiles are legion. The mixture of alcohol and laptop-carrying employees seldom proves to be a happy one.
Nevertheless, one company hoped to use the power of alcohol to get a missing laptop returned. In this case, however, the cause of the loss was not alcohol related – the computer was stolen rather than mislaid by an intoxicated employee. Indeed, the Croucher Brewing Company in New Zealand had promised a lifetime’s supply of free beer for the person that identified the laptop thief.
Such enterprising thinking has, despite global coverage in the media, failed to deliver. At the time of writing, the culprit had not been identified. However, the publicity – and well wishes from people far and wide in sympathy with the company’s plight – has “allowed a devastating event to have a silver lining,” notes company co-owner Paul Croucher on the company website.
After all, you just can’t buy that sort of publicity.
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