OK Soda

In the mid nineties, Coca-Cola decided to try out a new soda. They wanted to tap into the generation x market and create something that screamed anti-image. What their efforts produced was OK Soda. The soda that told you it was just fine to be OK. This brand was not trying to be exuberant or jolly. OK was not going to go to war with any other flavor. It was just there, and blah. The flavor was never described or even mentioned in marketing. The flavor was beside the point. It may be the first and only Soda to have had a manifesto. I took this off Wikipedia:

1. What’s the point of OK? Well, what’s the point of anything?
2. OK Soda emphatically rejects anything that is not OK, and fully supports anything that is.
3. The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be.
4. OK Soda says, “Don’t be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything.”
5. OK Soda reveals the surprising truth about people and situations.
6. OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK.
7. There is no real secret to feeling OK.
8. OK Soda may be the preferred drink of other people such as yourself.
9. Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of “OK” brand soda.
10. Please wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK.

One day after school a friends and I went to the soda machine to get something to keep us hyper on the bus ride home. The new button on the machine’s display intrigued us.

We bought a couple cans. Both cans were noticeably different from one another and very peculiar compared to any other can designs we’d seen before. We bought as many we could, which was about three more. Fifteen year olds don’t have much cash. For whatever reason from that point on we claimed the drink as our own. We were too naive too see the ridiculousness of the way OK was pushed in an un-pushy manner. There was even an 800 phone number that you could call and listen to messages of other OK fans and why they felt OK about the product.

A year or so later the soda stopped showing up on shelves and I heard rumors that it was being discontinued. So bummed were we. This was near the time I discovered the internet and would spend time searching on infoseek every pop culture word I could find. One day I came across a “Save OK Soda” site. The site suggested writing Coca-Cola and telling them what you thought about not being able to drink the beverage choice of the over bored youth of America. So I did. A few weeks passed and I received a letter from Jennifer telling me that I was outta luck. Thanks Jennifer. Last week my mother sent me a box, as she does every month. These boxes contain among other things letters and photos from when I lived at home. The OK Soda reject letter was in this box.

I decided to point out the key parts of my letter proving I had too much time on my hands.:

1.She thanked me, because Jennifer cares.

2. The awful news. The The end of the road. I had Kurt Cobain lying on the floor wearing maroon converse flashbacks.

3. Yes, Jennifer I was. Please rub my face in that.

4. You did not work hard enough. There has not since been OK soda at my table. Surge and diet/lemon/vanilla/coke do not count.

5. Jennifer signed her name. I would lick my finger to see if the ink is real, but the letter is from 1997 and that’s really old ink.

Moral: Distance make the heart grow fonder vs. Out of sight, out of reasonable judgment to spend your teenage years doing productive things and instead writing emails to corporate giants with zero chance of getting results.