I found the cure for hope

The Pessimist's Mug from Despair Inc. Avital laughed at my coffee mug yesterday at breakfast. Although familiar with the genre of “inspirational posters” from the SkyMall catalog, she had never come across the parodies of them. Obviously she had never seen Derek‘s cube.

Back in 1999 when Yahoo! was still a relatively small company, we did a deal with Despair, Inc. In exchange for free stuff (T-shirts, mugs, posters, calendars) we gave them some free advertising in the form of a BooHoo! web portal. They came by and took some photos in our cubes of us wearing their “I found the cure for hope” T-shirts.

The photos they took got heavily Photoshopped. Compare the expression on my face in the photo at the bottom of the phony press release with the original. They turned my smile into a frown!