Try a Free Trial

Try A Free Trial ©

By Michael Casey

I’m trying to get noticed as a writer as you all know, I have a website and I regularly post, in the vain hope of finally getting noticed. I even had a low budget film producer say he’d put my Pitch to his backers. Sadly nothing came of it.

There is Mandy.com which has all kinds of everything on it, that’s how I stumbled over the film producer, a year ago. So you can all try that. There are job agencies too, for Media with a capital M. I got an invite today to try one, a week’s free trial, but you have to enter your bank details first.

So I just sent him my Linkedin Profile and CV piece as well as my elevator ad,  90 seconds with Michael, cartoons for radio. I hope it amuses him, perhaps he’ll post it on his site for a week, and then I’ll finally get noticed and start making a living from writing. Ok, I can hear you laughing at the back, stop it or I’ll tell your mother.

You can even get a free trial of Jonathon Cainer the horoscope guy, I don’t begrudge him a penny he does have a large family to bring up single-handedly. I was at Mass on Sunday and there was a family with 5 children just like Jonathon, at Mass they were all under 9 years old. It made me smile I was from a family of 15 if you include the lodgers and the cat and dog.

Free trials are great if they really are free, like the samples you get at Costco or Sainsbury’s but that’s food. You could always bring your family along and be like gannets enjoying the biscuits or sliced ham or whatever it may be. Move from shop to shop till you have fed the kids. Though some steal the produce from the dustbins behind the big store, we’ve all seen it happen.

Broadband is the biggest free trial we all get offered, Virgin was cabled our street so you get big red envelopes offering all the deals. Or so you used to, people just threw them in the recycling bin. So Virgin got clever and posted them in big white envelopes, so people would at least open them. This kind of marketing is 3% effective so I was told in my market research days. So now the envelopes are opened, and then thrown in the recycle bin.  

BT itself also has direct mail offers, free offers, to you John Doe and your sister Jane. Thanks to computers the same letter can be tailored to fit all kinds of names. Special offers just for you, only you in your street, just you and not even your next door neighbour. My neighbour just updated her broadband, we’ll discuss it over the garden fence when I bring the washing in. Anyways broadband IS an essential service. The Government thinks so, because they can tax whatever business is generated.

Free trials of films straight down your internet connection, free trials of Times Newspaper straight down your internet. I did ask could Rupert give me a column in one of his papers, I have a back list well over 520 shorts. Then you’d all get me as well as the Times. He hasn’t replied yet, but I’ve been waiting all my life, maybe when he reaches 100, then he’ll give in, 18 years to go then.