I’ve been crowdsourced!

Sadly this doesn’t involve leaping off the main stage to be held aloft by the Glastonbury faithful. Indeed, I feel that moment may have passed me by. But it did involve a cute campaign and an unscheduled retro chocolate purchase.

So there I am tapping away on the laptop when a very simple pop-up pops up with a choice of six voting buttons and asks, ‘Which Revel will you vote out?’ Now, while I’m not that clear on the relative merits of our main political parties and a fair few religious faiths, I do have an instant opinion on which lack-lustre flavour should be summarily evicted.

As soon as I’d voted, the pop-up disappeared. No one demanded my details, my socio-demographics or to know how I’d heard about them. And no one wanted me to create a password that was a mixture of letters and numbers and to type it in twice. Those nice people at Mars just wanted to hear which chocolate I wanted out and I was happy to tell them. That’s crowdsourcing.

No doubt the results will provide the next installment of the print and TV campaign. Then it will be back online to vote for a new flavour to replace the hapless evictee with the results of that survey be pumped back into offline vehicles again. And at that point I’m just going to have to buy a bloody bag because I’m engaged now, I have a stake in this, and I need to have a view on the new flavour on the block. Clever.

I’m explaining all this to Lynne, my very world-weary and delightfully cynical friend, as we queue for the flicks. But as we head over to the popcorn, she stops and stares ruefully at the sweetie stall before saying, “But what if orange really is evicted. This might be our last ever chance…”

As for rock-and-roll moments, I may never have got to crowd surf, but last week, as I finally extracted myself from a rather messy team karaoke session, I did get to say, ‘My name’s Sam Howard. Goodnight!’