How this Verizon Commercial really plays out

"Stop telling me to plug the cord into the connector, I've done that and it's not working!"

"(Sigh) ok, moron- because I don't want to spend any more time on the phone with your worthless, helpless ass, I'm sending you a link so I can see what you see."

"You can do that?  Wait a minute- what button do I push on my phone once you send the App? And what's an App, anyway?"

"(Groan) ok I'm just going to send an Application which allows me to basically take over your phone's camera so I can see what you can see but are failing to see."

"Wait a minute, let me get my daughter over here to do that, I don't know what you are talking about."

"We've got the camera working now, just point it at the box.  See that cord, the one in your hand?  Stick it in the connector to the left, just like I told you fifteen times before getting control of your phone."

"Ok, I did that."

"No, you put the cord into the light socket.  Put it in the cable box.  That's the box on top of the TV.  Just connect the cord to the connector to the left.  Slowly now.  That's right, you've got it!"

"Hey, I did it, this is a great service!"

"We know- it allowed us to fire hundreds of service techs last year and made our stock go up almost half a point.  Of course, by 'we' I mean the people who own Verizon.  I just work a phone bank, and if you think I'm actually a twentysomething white guy sitting in a stylish office, I understand why you were too stupid to figure out how to plug in a cord without having your hand held through the process."

An open letter to Sirius/XM MLB Radio....

(You can just ignore the embedded commercial, though it does kind of fit part of my rant because its about the LA Dodgers....)

Dear hosts of Sirius/XM Channel 89 and Major League Baseball,

1.  I don't know where you got the idea that we want to hear Tommy Lasorda wax poetic about baseball for three minutes before each pre-game segment, but we really don't.  I doubt even Dodgers fans are all that interested in listening to Lasorda blather about kids and dirt and bats and balls and the smell of autumn in the air blah blah blah, but if you must include his dopey dialogue you could at least confine it to those games.

2.  I don't know why you think that we want to hear endless interviews with players, or why you think you can sell us on those guest spots merely by telling the hosts to sound excited about them-- "Coming next, we'll have the backup catcher for the San Diego Padres farm team, I'm really hyped about it!  I mean, I am seriously PUMPED!"  All they do is make me change the channel- and yes, very often I forget to change it back.  For days.

3.  If you do insist on featuring these interviews, could you PLEASE insist that the hosts go beyond the insultingly inane, lazy questions we simply don't give a damn to have answered and which don't provide even a modicum of insight?  Enough already with the "how excited are you to be in the playoff race" and "how cool is it to be a teammate of (insert player we couldn't get to come on the show here?")  These are questions a kid working for his High School newspaper would be embarrassed to ask.

4.  The other day you actually had the UFC Heavyweight Champion as a guest.  WTF? Why don't you just scream "I'm bored with baseball" and get it over with?  I'd ask what's next, but I don't think you can sink lower than that.

5.  Postgame shows provide local flavor.  Stop cutting them off so you can return to generic blather with your national hosts.  The less of them the better.

There's more, but I'll save it for another letter.

Sincerely, XM Radio Subscriber (since 2003.)

Gatorade has us diving for the mute button....

Someone at Gatorade thought that this was a really good idea.  And then someone else- probably several someone elses- agreed and cut a check to make it happen.  And then camera crews were arranged and sites scouted and agreed upon and maybe an entire day was spent in filming.

And during all this, nobody said "wait a minute, this is really awful and it will make our customers hate us?"

Even the YouTubers agree- this is an obnoxious failure of epic proportions.  If it's going to be a regular feature during tv college football games this year, I'm just going to take the season off and listen to something more enjoyable, like cats being tortured.  Why can't the cicadas show up and drown out this crap?

Did Sally Struthers ever offer a degree in Tire Retreading?

In the late-1980s, I had the best job imaginable for a kid working his way through graduate school- I managed a video rental store.  What made it a fantastic job was all the fun conversations with regular customers about this or that latest release, how amazing it was that Superman IV managed to be even worse than Superman III, and how we all appreciated Golan and Globus for making the video rental industry even possible.

I also remember watching recruitment tapes which explained what a great career managing a video rental store could be- with awesome benefits (like free rentals, plus....well, that's about it, really) in an industry which would just keep growing and growing....um, right?

When I saw this classic Sally Struthers Correspondence Courses commercial on YouTube, it made me a little nostalgic about my days at the old video store, and also made me wonder what happened to the people who bought in to the idea that managing one might be the late-20th century equivalent of working the assembly line at the Ford factory- something you did for forty years or so before retiring with a sweet pension (or at least a hefty 401k.)  Obviously those dreams did not become a reality.  Ok for me, as I had no intention of devoting my life to a job suited for a college kid, but I'm sure that there were plenty of people who watched the rapid demise of the video rental industry* at the dawn of the 21st century with more than a little anxiety at the idea of starting over.

What happened to the people who decided to go all in for training in VCR repair or "Learning the Personal Computer?"  An earlier Struthers ad I remember even included Typewriter Repair as one of the options.  Did this training result in a few years of steady paychecks before those jobs were swept into the dustbin with streetlamp lighting and meter reading?

(I also thought it was more than a little appropriate that Sally Struthers would be pitching these courses - while she would find steady work on television over the next forty years her career peaked before her thirtieth birthday and I always imagined that while she was urging the audience to look into career options and telling us "do you want to make more money? Sure, we all do!" she was speaking for herself as much as for the company that hired her.)

*Which was already underway when I departed the industry in 1991.  My last job for the company I managed for was to close three of the chain's stores through liquidation sales.   The only VHS tape left unsold in one of the stores was the Justine Bateman vehicle Satisfaction (yes, I know Julia Roberts was in it, but it was Bateman's movie.)  The last I heard, Bateman was studying Computer Science.  Good to have a fallback, even if it's not on Sally Struther's list.

"Real People, Not Actors" already infatuated by Chevys tell us how much they love Chevys

Listening to these "Real People, Not Actors" brown-nosers buzzphrase their way into a few seconds of screen time is enough to really take me off my lunch.   And it doesn't even make any sense that they slavishly praise the truck they are being shown- I mean, wouldn't it be a better commercial if they were just a little bit skeptical of Chevrolet instead of being 100 percent sold on the company and their products before going in, instead of this "you don't even have to show me the vehicle, I am so totally into Chevy already" crap?  Who would be convinced by any of this?

Oh right- Real Stupid People desperate for attention.  Not Actors.  And glue-sniffing Youtube commentators.  I keep forgetting.

You were not missed

This commercial is about as welcome as a tic; I mean, this guy wasn't even gone long enough to score nostalgia points with his return.

Personally, I'm dissapointed to learn that he didn't die in a fire or at least give up the commercial gigs and go back to law school, or something.  If this is the beginning of another line of "Can You Hear Me Now" commercials, well, I guess my mute button is going to get a serious workout this football season.

As for his "friend"- congratulations, lady, on your plans to become the most obnoxious, techno-addled twit on the planet.  I'll be counting my blessings, including the biggest one- that I don't know you.

(BTW, why is this "conversation" taking place outside a movie theater?  Am I missing something here?  Never mind.  I don't think I want to know.)

Live from Levittown, in the southern part of Uttar Pradesh.....

I guess this commercial takes place in an alternate universe where people in an obvious American suburb populated by Indians not only know what cricket is but are aware of terms like "batsmen," can identify a particular cricket player as "the most dangerous batsman in the world," and have neighbors who are equally impressed that such a person lives on their street and is willing to demonstrate his skills in front of a bizarrely appreciative audience.  I suspect that this same group of people will fall into a swoon when the captain of the Olympic Curling team moves in next winter.

Meanwhile, despite it becoming very, very obvious that the ball struck by the ---umm,  batsman--- is completely harmless, the jittery jerk driving the car puts his family in peril by freaking out and crashing into a fence and an actual working fountain in the front yard (an actual working fountain in the front yard?  Oh go f--k yourselves, you entitled asshats.)

This is all completely understandable to the State Farm agent- "ah yes, of course- it makes perfect sense that your wife pointed out that this guy was about to hit a cricket ball, that you saw it coming at your car, that you saw it bounce off your car and hit a window- and you responded by losing control of that car and crashing it through a fence and into an actual working fountain (again, grrrrr....rage rising.....) instead of just applying the brakes or using the foreknowledge provided by your wife to prepare for the possibility of your car being hit by the ball.....yeah, you're covered, though may I say you should probably be letting your wife drive....."