Why Capt. Slow was sacked by AutoCar

[Jake]

 

 

Dismissal from Autocar Magazine

 

May confessed that he was fired in 1992 from Autocar magazine after putting together a hidden message in one issue. At the end of the year, the magazine's "Road Test Year Book" supplement was published. Each spread featured four car reviews and each review started with a large, red, drop capital letter. May's role was to put the entire supplement together, which "was extremely boring and took several months". He went on to say:

So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was to the effect that "You might think this is a really great thing, but if you were sitting here making it up you'd realise it's a real pain in the arse". It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I'd actually forgotten that I'd done it because there's a bit of a gap between it being "put to bed" and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company's office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I'd done because I'd made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they'd written in thinking they'd won a prize or a car or something.

[JustGav]

Putting a hidden message is good for a laugh, but more importantly WTF reads a magazine and studies it that closely to find that the letters make a word....

[jamesmark]

Class pure class.

[Ian R]

[Blackie]

thats class

[Havard]

If that is true then that is legendary!!

 

H.

[Class One]

Genius

[RobSheffield]

He deserved a promotion, not a dismissal

[Trig]

[Pete]

That's hysterical!

[edd_t]

haha thats cool

[Rayman]

hahha, that sort of thing would have got him the job at top gear. Didnt realise he would have been up for that sort of thing lol

[neil tt]

It showed excellent creativity:d

[TonyP]

Brilliant. Never would have thought he had it in him.

[ivan]

I remember him admitting to that in an interview recently.

Or was it on Have I Got News...

[tbourner]

Brilliant. Never would have thought he had it in him.

 

He's the perfect example of not judging a book by it's cover, if you see enough of him on TV (when he's not being made fun of by JC and Ham) he's a really funny bloke, pretty quick and a good sense of humour.