A longish story with an important moral at the end

On Saturday morning I ventured into the city to purchase an engagement present for some friends of mine. After exiting the multi-story car park, I soon noticed a young bloke with a wad of flyers standing at the intersection I was approaching. I immediately began planning an escape route, which included adding an extra hundred metres or so to my path. However, I observed flyer-man was only handing out the flyers, and not attempting to engage people in awkward, confrontational discussion about whatever his cause may be. With the escape plan no longer so necessary, I proceeded to the intersection and duly accepted my copy of what I could now see was the following flyer:

Although largely relieved I had been spared a ‘turn or burn’ message (complete with quotes from the King James Bible that I don’t quite understand) I was still somewhat disappointed to find out it was just a hippie rant about evil corporations and deforestation. However, once I had safely crossed the road I opened up my hippie literature, complete with butterfly on cover, only to discover it was a pro-Gunns flyer, produced by Gunns. I was amused, as it was clearly meant to fool me in exactly the way it had.

Later that morning, I ran into Alan Reader at Villino. With the flyer still in hand, we began to discuss Gunns and their ingenious tactics of deceptive flyers. I was particularly vocal about the fact that they had used poor-formatting and layout to give the appearance of something produced by the environmental movement. See the page below for example:

As you can see, each page consists of a picture that may well have been sourced from Google Images, and some centred text underneath using the much loved font of Comic Sans. Hardly a professional publication by any standards. As I continued to comment on the crappy formatting, I heard the voice of a lady somewhere behind me say “Do you like my brochure?”. Much to my horror, it turned out the whole time I had been insulting this fine work of art, the creator had been sitting in the cafe listening to every word I said. An interesting, albeit brief, conversation followed (which mostly involved me trying to dig myself out of a large hole). For the record, she admitted it was intended to look like something put out by the environmental movement.

Moral of the story: be careful what you say in a cafe – you never know who is listening.