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Tuesday 1 July 2014

The Cronut of all evil

I have blogged a few times about how ignorant comments made about diabetes or to a diabetic about their condition can make people with the condition feel.

Most things, whilst I can get upset, I can politely discuss with the offending person because I know a very large part of what they have said comes from misconceptions made worse by the very wrong public perception of diabetes.

Then there's The Paramount Coffee Project, who came in with fully loaded bazukas and blew all other ignoranases clean out of the competition. The fact that I am still cranky enough the next day to write this is testament to the anger that pulsed hard through my veins.

I opened up my facebook newsfeed yesterday to see a post from the Paramount Coffee Project being passed around in diabetic circles. They had erred harshly on the side of "how is being this horribly ignorant and rude even possible" with their post. They had created a secret menu item that was only available if you asked specifically for it - prior knowldedge only kinda deal. Which is a great marketing strategy. Unfortunatley their marketing genius obviously used up all his genius on the secret menu idea and had a severe case of brain fart when coming up with the title and marketing catch phrase of this secret item.

They called a ridiculously delish looking cronut topped with affogato and some other fancy thing I can't remember 'Diabetes'. Yes, Diabetes is what they named their dish. The cronut they had pictured was very soft and looked like heaven for your mouth . Diabetes does not look like this. Diabetes looks like fingers covered in red and black pinprick marks. Diabetes looks like an alien insulin pump canula stark white against pink flesh. Diabetes looks like bruises, blood and needle marks. It looks like dark circles under your eyes and worry lines on parents' faces.

There's infinite amounts I can say about how naming a dessert 'Diabetes' is just plain wrong and should never have been suggested or followed through with in the first place. Comments were made about how there is no way they would ever call a dessert 'SIDS surprise' or 'Cancer Cake' (N.B. - I fully understand how serious these are - this is for example only) - because diabetes isn't recognised as being the serious disease that it absolutely is.

After the shock of the name, I read the description, which ended with the phrase 'So come in and ask for diabetes today'. This was the part for me, that made me wish all sorts of evil things on this establishment. NOBODY - I repeat NOBODY would EVER EVER EVER IN A HEARTBEAT ask for diabetes. NOBODY does this 'to themselves' willingly. I don't ask for needles, sleepless nights, hypos and hypers, fingerpricks in the blistering cold or anything else that settled into the spot where my defunct pancreas resides when diabetes wriggled it's way into my life.

Thankfully, the DOC was all over this. I think this post was averaging 3 tirades per minute about the seriousness of what they thought was a 'joke'. People posted links to tribunals to make official complaints, tagged Diabetes Australia and all sorts of fun things to help with the message that this was not even a little bit o.k.

Unfortunately for the establishment, this was all going on whilst the 'creative genius' behind it all slept soundly. The post was removed today and a belated apology issued. I don't know how many phone calls they recieved this morning. I feel sorry for the staff, who might have had to deal with eventuated threats from parents that they would bring their 5 year old with Type 1 in to the store so the workers could explain to him that some cronut he had never eaten was the reason why he has to inject insulin for the rest of his life. For Paramount's employees sake, I hope they left the phone off the hook today.


Power to the DOC (who I can see are still worked up over it this morning based on the posts and jokes being made about Paramount). I hope I never see anything this disgustingly ill-informed again in my life.







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