Ruby has given a glimpse at the kind of work she's doing for her Dickens module, and I weep for the poor bastards stuck in an assignment group with her.
Before she gets started on unveiling her staggering work of academic genius, she offers up some motivational insanity:
Today is a good day to have a good day, apparently, as opposed to yesterday, which was a bad day to have a good day, and last Thursday, which was the perfect day to have the worst day of your life.
The core elements of a good day: Pretending to read a book in a dusty room, with askew pictures on the wall, your new favourite scarf laid out on your bed like a throw, lukewarm tea and a big glass of water to stave off the urge to actually eat food when you're hungry.
Ruby will probably be releasing the "Good Day/Bad Day Calendar" soon, so you'll know precisely when to schedule your good days and what days in which it's appropriate to just straight-up salt the earth and ruin your life.
Then it's time for the grand unveiling of her Dickens assignment, for which she's been tasked with making Dickens accessible to wider audiences. Because if there's one person that springs to mind when I picture who is definitely in touch with the thoughts and interests of everyday people, it's Ruby "Detached From Reality" "Granger".
As she does in all things in life, Ruby has immediately pushed her way to being the centre of attention, making sure she's both closer to the camera in the photo of her study group, but also just going completely OTT with her facial expressions and wild gestures. This is what excitement looks like, allegedly.
The person next to Ruby appears to be barely suppressing genuine confusion and terror, which is the correct response when forced to be around Ruby.
To make Dickens accessible to wider audiences today, in the age of Coronavirus, Ruby thought it'd be a good idea to go with a Dickens-themed escape room, despite escape rooms waning in popularity years ago, and now being the worst possible time to recommend that anyone go touching everything in a room that numerous other people have also touched.
Part/all of their assignment relies on marketing their idea, apparently, which sounds like a high school business GCSE assignment and not part of a third year English Lit degree module.
Ruby has taken marketing this fake escape room experience about as seriously as she's taken marketing her own, real products for sale. In other worse: Not at all.
So you're ready for an exciting experience, maybe a work outing to escape the office drudgery and get to know your colleagues, maybe to have fun with friends after drinks and a meal. Escape rooms were all the rage a few years ago, so why not try one? You're definitely going to throw down your cash for this one, after getting an impromptu, incomplete history lesson about Charles Dickens' name:
This is the introductoty post on the escape room's faux marketing Insta. Because learning about Charlie D's nicknames, the social problems addressed in Dickens' work and how they relate to life today is exactly what people are craving in a
bleeping escape room. I think the third entry in the hit Escape Room movie thriller franchise will be all about the same thing. 'Escape Room 3: The Curse of Chucky D' hits cinemas in 2023.
"Does the word Boz mean anything?" asks a commenter. Ruby doesn't know, and offers no answers. But maybe you'll find the answers to this mystery in the escape room...
Next, the main logo for their exciting new escape room, which is just basic, boring font on a black background, with a shoddily clipped and pasted image of a burning candle. She's also made sure that the "Escape Room" part - y'know, the entire crux of the experience they're selling - is as small as possible.
But surely she's cut corners on the logo because they're still recovering from all the hard work they did setting up a fake Dickensian escape room facade for a photoshoot to lure in customers, right? Since that would be the first time Ruby has put any effort into anything that wasn't depriving charities of money and to-do lists, she's not broken the trend.
"Just throw a magnifying glass next to a Dickens book on a grimy windowsill with dead flies on it," Ruby said to herself, using her disgusting den of filth and dust as the natural location for a Dickensian workshop. Also a burning, broken "candlestick" next to a pile of flammable material provides the suggestion of mystery and danger. Why is that candle snapped? Is there a key hidden inside? It must be a clue, surely!
Next, Ruby has decided to include a picture of her parents' Dickens collection (and a disgusting, melted glob of wax for visual flavour).
"(publishing history of Dickens books)"
What does that mean? Is this a placeholder for later historical information? Does she mean this photo is supposed to be the complete published work of Dickens? If so, having all the books on camera might be good, instead of cropping them off awkwardly. And where's the proper capitalisation and punctuation in this faux design piece made for a third year module in an English Lit degree?
But if seeing Ruby's musky, poorly-taken-care-of borrowed book collection isn't enough to allure the masses into paying for an escape room experience, then she'll take this up a notch!
"think Dickens is outdated?" Ruby asks, without a capital T, because who needs proper capitalisation in third year English uni assignments? Well, think again, you goddammit peasants! Dickens is modern and relevant!
He popularised all those words you modern people use in your Tinder bios and in your TikTok videos, like "podsnappery". Ahh, if I had a penny for every time I'd used that word...(this paragraph would be the first).
We know all great escape room marketing includes vaguely antagonist rhetorical questions thrown at potential customers and provides them with pointless and unrelated answers. It's a brief peek at the mystery, intrigue and mind-bending excitement you'd experience at this new escape room, which increasingly looks like it'd be you trying to escape Ruby's room as she shouts random, poorly-researched Dickens factoids at you, before you die of boredom and dust inhalation.
Ruby continues the assault of poorly-thought-out "education", offering up essay snippets asking viewers/potential customers if they believe the criminal justice system today is still as flawed as it was in the Dickensian era.
But the key component to any marketing campaign is to let people know the location, the price, any accessibility information, and so on.
Unfortunately, finding this escape room would be part of the mystery itself, as Rubes only teases that it's "in central London, just a few minutes from Russell Square tube station'. Central London is a pretty barren place with not many buildings or businesses, so that should narrow it down enough. The cost will remain a mystery until you receive an invoice in the post a month later, printed on Pumpkin Productivity letterhead. Making up a fake address, price and opening hours, etc. was simply too much work for Ruby to put into this final year uni assignment, evidently.
In lieu of any actual imagination, planning, cohesive ideas and hard work, Ruby has then opted to just weaponise her privilege, giving herself and her group an advantage over other students by just begging all followers on her main profile to go follow her fake profile for her uni assignment.
Her assignment should stand on its own and be judged on its own merits, but Ruby has opted to just cheat, and will undoubtedly brag that her page attracted tonnes of followers, even though none of the people following would have done so if influencer Ruby Granger hadn't asked them to.
If I were a uni tutor and received this as an assignment, I'd be flabbergasted how terrible and poorly thought out it was. Must try harder, Ruby.