Saturday, July 9, 2016
When the Oxygen....err, Internet....is cut off
I remember watching a movie once in which a group of people were trapped in an abandoned bomb shelter and realized that they didn't have any water and were going to slowly die of thirst. The growing sense of panic they felt at the approach of imminent death never reached the level experienced by the people in this ad as they attempt to come to grips with the fact that OMIGOD THE INTERNET IS OUT IF THIS KEEPS UP I MIGHT HAVE TO TALK TO THESE PEOPLE I SHARE A HOUSE WITH.
Seriously, this is beyond disgusting. Here we have a "family" of genetically related knobs who are all sitting around with their own electronic devices desperate to remain "connected" with the outside world so that they can continue to ignore the people sitting a few feet away. I know this is supposed to be exaggeration and all (they end up actually spying on their still-connected neighbor- that doesn't happen in real life, right?) but why would anyone find this scene funny or entertaining, let alone anything you'd want to emulate in your own home? If I were to walk into my house and find wife and kids all sitting in various places staring at their own screens- and then freaking out when the "service" is interrupted- instead of interacting like I kind of thought families were supposed to (and generally wanted to?- I don't think my response would be "oh, the internet is out?" I think it would be more like "the internet is way, way too important in this house. Let's work on this."
But maybe I'm just not of this world. After all, I don't have a wife and kids and I don't live in a massive house and I don't have DVR which allows me to record six shows while watching a seventh and store away 7000 hours of television for "later," and I don't have a smart phone I can watch television on when I'm out of the house and which can give me instant answers to every question that pops into my head. When the internet goes down there are still books to read and people to talk to using my voice and not my fingers. And I don't find any of these "Better Get Reliable Internet Or You'll See This In Your Home" ads anything but depressing.
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I have to go to the public library to get on the internet; I reside in a small one-bedroom apartment; my cell-phone is a basic one (which recently has conked-out ...meaning at this moment I have NO phone service whatsoever); I don't have cable or satellite T.V. (I do have DVDs and audio CD-Rs though).
ReplyDeleteI'm quite "stone-age" myself for the times.
Because a shorter version of this commercial is run so relentlessly on baseball games, and because it speaks to everything you hate, I have been looking forward to seeing you rip it apart. Nice job. There are so many specifically irritating things about it, from the father racing through the house with the family yelling "Come on, work together, work together!" (what the hell does he mean? How is "working together" going to restore their Internet service?) to the daughter clutching her netbook and whispering desperate prayers to the Internet to return ("please, please, I love you so much"), to the fact that they spy on the neighbors downloading cat videos as their desperate new form of entertainment. At least on TV we don't see the earlier situations in which we learn they have entirely forgotten how to entertain themselves or go to a movie, and can't trust going to a restaurant without reading a thousand online reviews of it first.
ReplyDeleteNow. Would I be as upset as these people with my Internet down? Possibly, but I might have good reason. I have a really busy job and end up working from home a lot. Which requires that my Internet be up. So if I was on a deadline and my Internet went down, yeah, I'd be as desperate as these people. But at least I'd have a job-related excuse. It wouldn't be because my life was meaningless without my daily adult requirement of cat videos.
And yeah, posting this here does make me feel a bit ironic.