New Slogans

As Jason and I find ourselves in what feels like an endless cycle of broken things I accidentally made a joke today. I was looking at our John Deere garden tractor, dead in the driveway yet again. Jason saw me looking at it and said “nothing runs like a Deere.” (Surely everyone knows the John Deere slogan?) My response was “yes, nothing runs like a Deere – when it feels like running.”

Then I moved on to the Ford slogan: “Built Ford Tough.” I can hardly type that with a straight face. Apparently our Ford tractor didn’t get that memo. Or maybe the real question here is exactly how tough – or not – is Ford tough? From what I can tell it is about as tough as I am when I see a snake.

Then there is our Duramax diesel truck. According to Chevrolet it is “Like a Rock.” My response to that was yes, if built like a rock means it wants to be an inanimate object and sit there immobile all the time. If that is the case our truck has this rock thing down pat. I mean our truck is all over being a large, inanimate object these days. Like a rock indeed.

The sad part is that all of these things I am referring to are not old, have been meticulously maintained, and on top of that they were expensive. I would feel better about it if these were old, cheap pieces of junk (well apparently they are junk but I digress . . .) that never had any maintenance. Sometimes it feels like you just cannot win.

Jason was having so much fun with some of these slogans (much of which I cannot put in print) he even wrote up a few of his own thoughts on this topic. A two for one blog tonight!

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(from Jason) It seems sometimes like I’m surrounded by farm equipment that comes with catchy slogans attached. The reason for this is that it’s a lot cheaper to come up with a catchy slogan than it is to actually build equipment that will run and keep running through years of normal farm wear.

Nothing Runs Like a Deere. Exactly, except it needs to be preceded by “Thankfully”. When our diesel JD 455 lawn tractor gave up the ghost three weeks ago I brought my 35 year old Kubota B7100 (no slogan attached) that hasn’t cut any grass for *two years* up here to replace it. Not only did it start right up, it actually did a much better job of cutting the grass that the JD ever did. So much for running like a Deere.

Chevy – Like a Rock – Well, this one’s pretty accurate too. Rocks don’t move without a lot of prodding and neither has our Chevy truck. At least not lately. It’s spent ten of the last thirty days in the shop and would anyone care to guess it’s location this evening ?

They may well be Built Ford Tough but what they aren’t telling you is that Ford was the most sickly kid in it’s class. I can’t tell you the number of times our ancient, high hour Kubota M4950 loader tractor has come to the rescue when our Ford 7610 was under the weather – again.

Please feel free to share your modified slogans in the comments. We would love to have some more laughs on this subject!

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Lighty having a good roll . . .