Put Yourself in My Shoes (2004)

About

“Put Yourself in My Shoes” is a meme consisting of parodies of a safety notice from the United States Postal Service. Most of the derivatives were created within a few days in 2004 on SomethingAwful.com but the images went viral all over the web.

Origin

The source image that the edited images are based on is a safety notice issued by the US Postal Service, pictured below:

On May 20th, 2004, a Something Awful goon named Djarum posted the following message:

So yesterday I walk downstairs to get my mail, along with the tons of free magazines and bills I get this.

Since when has the Postal Serivce been sending out such great little safety notices?

Well of course the first thing that I thought of was to post it on here for everyone to partake in the fun.

I start it when my first horrible attempt.

Hopefully someone can do justice to it.

UPDATE

eaglebtc was kind enough to help everyone out with the whole process. Here’s what he told me:

quote:

I’ve got a multi-layer PSD and a RAR with all the fonts for the HelveticaNeue family. They are in OpenType format, which means anyone using Windows 2000 or XP can read them. Or they can download a free font reader. Contributors should grab the following archive: http://www.promotionsfd.com/test/usps-goldmine.rar It contains the layer-separated PSD template, plus the USPS logo (EPS, with emblem reversed) and the font pack necessary for the text. The PSD template has all layers separated by component: gray box, outline, dog & man, text, top box, etc. Its current size is 1600×1000, approximately. Becuase I made it larger, I redrew the “vector” objects so they would look better at this higher output resolution (150dpi). The text layers are in place, with the correct font selected. The user must have the fonts installed before they open the PSD or they will receive a warning.

Hope it helps!

In the next ten pages, hundreds of derivatives were created. It soon became a contest.
Results were archived on May 24th and May 31st, 2004.

Those Are My Shoes

Of all of the diverse instances of this meme, the “Those are my shoes Give them back You are a dog” instance became the most popular of all.

YTMND

• Postal
• THOSE ARE MY SHOES
• They don’t even fit

On 4Chan

The “Put Yourself in My Shoes” meme never really caught on with 4chan, but “Those are my shoes. Give Them Back. You are a dog” spawned an anti-joke meme that is referred to on ED simply as Buzzkilling.