A Definitely Not the Daily News Special Report.
Hamburg (DNDS) – Clueless Blogger Ian in Hamburg was discovered today purchasing gasoline and a bag of corn chips at the Aral station down the street from where he lives, completely oblivious to the fact that Aral is, in fact, owned by British Petroleum.
Ian in Hamburg was so stunned to be informed he was actually purchasing goods from a company responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters of all time, he could only blurt out a response in cliché internet teen-speak.
“Oh. My. Föcking. God. You have, like, GOT to be kidding!” he blurted, looking over at his wife’s car in revulsion. “You mean she’s going to, like, be driving this thing knowing there’s, like, gas in it from BP? That’s even more disgusting than paying 10 bucks for a gallon of gas and 4.50 for 3 ounces of crappy corn chips.”
BP operates more than 2,400 gas stations in Germany under the Aral brand name. The company web site says more than 2.4 million Germans walk into its stations every day.
“I wonder how many Germans would keep buying from Aral if they knew it was BP?” he mused. “I mean, come on. BP is the Bopal for the new millennium. From now on, whenever the subject of corporate incompetence combined with bullshit PR downplaying mixed in with millions of litres of oil either washed up on beaches, coating wildlife or dispersed with toxic chemicals out at sea, people will automatically say BP, right? They won’t say Aral, will they?”
The boycott BP bandwagon includes the obligatory farcebook page everyone can forget they’ve signed up to once they’ve clicked away.
BP’s formidable public relations machine has gone into high gear to counter the negative backlash over the oil leak. They say the quantity of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico every day is still only a fraction of that which seeps naturally from seabeds or is spilled from ships, so everyone should just take a chill pill.
“We don’t think a boycott would help things at all,” said BP/Aral spokesthingy Abbit Dafft. “Keeping our shareholders happy and our profits obscene is the only way to make sure we can have the money to pay for the clean-up and still have enough left over for lawsuits.”
The company has even set up a Twitter account to make sure everyone – including those poor souls addicted to random bursts of personal trivia - gets the message about all the good things the company does for the environment and how seriously it takes the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
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