Adland has an image of a Buffalo-based Independent Health billboard which reads, You Deserve the RedShirt Treatment which, apparently, refers to the company’s red shirted staff. It’s a fairly innocuous headline until you realize the definition for Red Shirt, according to Wikipedia, is “A redshirt is a stock character, used frequently in science fiction but also in other genres, whose purpose is to die soon after being introduced, thus indicating the dangerous circumstances faced by the main characters. The term comes from the science fiction television series Star Trek, in which security officers wear red shirts and are often killed on missions under the aforementioned circumstances.” Oops. Of course, not that many people passing this billboard would actually know that so guess it’s all good.
