One of the strangest things about the fall is the way I get back into watching commercials. This is due to how my ‘TV year’ breaks down. With a few one-off exceptions like the odd NBA basketball game or idle time spent in someone else’s living room, I barely watch a commercial between the months of February and August. Once helmet football starts up again in September, though… I’m back, baby! Tell me what car to buy, tell me what beer to drink, tell me, TV, because I'm ready to spend!
Last fall, I decided to mark this great occasion by keeping track of the commercials I found most annoying. (No, reader, I’m not going to turn this into a nonsensical awards show!) Two advertisements in particular stick out in my mind.
The first is from Apple. It shows some kid – some annoying, snot-nosed kid – zipping around town on a bicycle and doing a variety of things with an iPad. Some of this stuff is pretty neat – a website about bugs in town, a video conversation with a friend, a burst of comic book reading on the bus, and so on. Great premise overall.
Here’s the problem: this kid is an asshole. Check out the conversation again with his broken-armed friend. Is there eye contact? Is there any compassion? Is there any attempt at conversation? No! Most of the time is spent in conversation with another person on the steps as they try to come up with the best way to make fun of the injured kid.
The iPad: make fun of your crippled friends, unless you are ignoring them.Or, consider the final scene. A neighbor comes outside and asks a perfectly reasonable question – what are you doing on your computer? Nice to be asked, right?
And what does this kid say? You got it, reader – what’s a computer?
WHAT'S A COMPUTER??? Hey Trebek, I got news for you - you’re ON a computer! It’s the only thing you’re on, unless you think the grass is a computer, but if you thought that, kid, if you thought that, you would have said – lying, on my computer. That would have been appropriate, since the kid knows what he's on, so he knows he's lying on it. Actually, come to think of it, that's all the kid is doing here... lying.
The iPad: be a pathological liar.Somehow, though, another commercial managed to annoy me even more than the Apple one. This one comes from GE, a company Boston recently opened up its loving bosom for thanks to its promise of more jobs, more growth, more blah blah blah...
The commercial starts just fine, starts a lot like the Apple one, in fact, as a promising young whiz kid realizes the world is her oyster. Apparently, she decides it is her mission to build an automated way to open said oyster. Her resulting accomplishments for me, really, are a mixed bag, at least in terms of usefulness (the automatic page-turner is a waste of time, the trash trick is a good solution, and the lawnmower is six of one and a half dozen of the other - it seems brilliant but could go off the rails very quickly if the rope snapped, you had a lawn with a weird shape, a dog ran into the yard, etc). But anyway, kudos to the young engineer, at least in an ‘A for effort’ sense.
But then this budding Edison graduates college and gets a job at GE. It’s never clarified what the job is – I’m guessing the title is ‘Automatic Job Cutter’ and the description is ‘find ways to put people out of work’. Now, on its own, this commercial could be just fine, could even be a delight, and I’m not generally against progress or technology
I guess my annoyance with this commercial centered around a more basic objection - I didn’t think it looked very good for GE to announce major layoffs and job cuts while this ad filled commercial breaks during helmet football games. A little kid being annoying about technology is one thing - kids don't really know better, whether they have a computer or not. But a major corporation run by 'adults' can probably find a way to spend advertising money that isn't insensitive to the hard workers who've seen their jobs evaporate through no fault of their own.
