I’ve previously featured a picture of a Diet Coke can by cogdogblog, which I found on Flickr. Although cogdogblog’s photo is much nicer, I thought I’d post my photo here, mainly so I could tell a related story.

I won’t re-tell the story of how I found Diet Coke – I did that in my original post about cogdogblog’s photo. Instead I’ll move on to a subsequent story.

After a long and desperate search, having finally found a can of Diet Coke, I took the photo above. This was back in 2002, when Diet Coke was almost impossible to get in China.

The reason I took the photo wasn’t for posterity or to put it on the Internet 7 years later. It was to keep on my camera, so I could show it to people at other restaurants / bars / shops and hopefully get a can of Diet Coke as a result.

The first time I tried to use the photo to get a can of Diet Coke was at a Buddhist restaurant at a tourist destination / scenic spot. I took out my camera, found the photo and showed it to the waitress. Her eyes lit up. She said something like “we have, we have” and went racing out the back.

She was back minutes later with an icy cold can of … Coke. Not Diet Coke. Coke.

Something was obviously lost in translation. Actually, I think at that time Diet Coke was so rare that the vast majority of people in China didn’t even know it existed. When presented with the photo, the waitress could tell it was a Coke product, but couldn’t differentiate between Coke and Diet Coke.

At the time, I wasn’t into Coke at all, I really only wanted Diet Coke, so this was major disappointment. The irony is that I no longer drink Diet Coke. I’m a Coke man again!