Companies who have checklist to make sure they get “all” of the company property back are awesome. It’s always made by HR with no clue what the job entails. I returned all of the company property listed items on the checklist.

Last layoff - real human beings- “Do you have time to drive to the office for a meeting? We are so sorry, business isn’t going well an we are having to cut whole departments. You are laid off the end of the week plus severence. Return the truck laptop, phone etc then. We’ll transfer the phone number to you, the supplier contracts etc that you brought in, we will sign off to you as well.”

Layoff before slimy corporate shills (all laid off a year later) teams meeting labeled as business discussion". Surprise, HR is on the call. You are not allowed to drive the company vehicle. At the end of this call IT will cut off the laptop phone and we’ll arrange for for someone to go to you house and collect company property.

So I drove the truck for 4 hours to collect all the stuff from my 3 offices. Then grabbed a guy from the last stop to drive the truck back after I finished cleaning it out at home. While I was driving I called up the new job I was supposed to start 2 months later and said, “Hey you guys OK will me starting next month instead?” I then took a nice 3 week vacation. Getting severance from a job I was going to quit, chef’s kiss .

There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.

Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.

Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.

Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.

This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.