Sure, the rats are gross, but the website is so annoying!

I’m sure that most people who are amused by such things are already aware of the crazy rat infestation at a NYC Taco Bell/KFC. The video is on YouTube; you can go watch it and be icked out by the large number of rodents of unusual size in an eatery. The remarkable thing for me, though, is what a god-awful fright the Taco Bell web presence is. I saw the video embedded over at Dogberry Patch, and there was this crazy comment by some PR flack for Taco Bell/KFC making it clear that not all of their establishments sport this spiffy entertainment feature and starting the all-important processes of duck-and-cover and finger pointing:

Some construction in the building’s basement last Thursday temporarily escalated the situation, and we are correcting that. Everyone at KFC and Taco Bell is working hard to take care of the issues at this restaurant.

“escalated”?!? These puppies (that’s about the right size) were OK when they were in the basement, and it’s just a darn shame that they decided to come upstairs for a visit? Man, people must be scrambling to figure out how to fire someone else over this…

The crazy part, though, is the URL in the comment that points you at their press release on the matter. Now my understanding of a press release is that it’s a form of broadcast communication aimed at reaching the largest audience possible (especially when you’re desparately trying to put out a forest fire like this). So, that might suggest that you present it in a simple form that’s easily accessible by most everyone. Not those geniuses at Taco Bell. Their press release page is this crazy combination of ASP and spiffy Macromedia Flash fun that is slow to load, subjects you to some pointless advertising images before you get to see the press release, doesn’t scroll properly, won’t allow you to copy/paste text out of their “message to the people”, and chews up massive amounts of CPU as long as you leave the window/tab open. And all this infrastructure to support three short, platitudinous and content free paragraphs (a total of four sentences).

To think that someone got paid to make a mess like that in public…

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