I was strolling down my local high street the other day, looking for gear boxes as it happens, and I saw a big sign outside a shop saying ‘gear boxes this way – instructions available in English’. Us technical PR folk are like that.

So I went inside said emporium, keen to get my hands on some lovely kit, only to find that the room marked, ‘geared motors’ was full of sand and contained nothing more than a cement mixer. The sign above the door said, ‘under construction’.

A similar thing happened when I tried to ask the salesmen about it. The name badge on his chest clearly said that he spoke most major European languages, but when I enquired, he was only able to show me a sign saying that the English language was coming soon.

As you can imagine, I was distraught.

“No-one could run a business like this,” I thought to myself. “This shop must be part of a horrifically extended metaphor, designed to encourage people to not have pages on their Web site with ‘under construction’ written on them. I think it’s a kind of warning to people not to tell their customers that part of their web site exists, when in fact it doesn’t.”

No-one could run a shop like that, of course. But they do.

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