Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (22 page)

Okay! You be the judge! Was the employer justified in firing this person? Think about it while we play the
Jeopardy
music:

Doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo DOO doo-doo-doo-doo-doo…

Time’s up! The answer, according to the Utah Department of Employment Security is: Yes, the employer WAS justified. The newsletter points out that “not only is setting a person’s beard on fire dangerous,” but also the forehead Post-it note indicates “an absence of professional behavior.” The department apparently did not give the employee any credit for refraining from attaching the note with a stapler.

Speaking of assaults, I have here a chilling news item from the September 3 edition of the
Asbury Park Press
, alertly sent in by John F. Coffey II, attorney at law. The item, which was written by Sheri Tabachnik and which I am not making up, begins as follows:

“A Belmar man who was throwing uncooked pasta out the window was charged by police with stabbing a man who was hit by the rigatoni, police said.”

The article states that the victim and some friends were walking on the street at about 2
A.M
. when “some people in an apartment began throwing uncooked pasta out the window at them.” Words were exchanged, and the pasta-wielding perpetrator allegedly came out of the apartment and stabbed the victim. According to a police spokesperson, “He must have hit him in an artery because he was gushing blood.”

The victim survived, but this tragic incident serves as yet another reminder to us all that, when we feel stress or anger, we must NOT, in a rash moment, unthinkingly reach for the rigatoni. Instead we should remember the words of the great pacifist Mohandas Gandhi, who in a famous 1949 speech, said, “Me, I prefer the number nine capellini.” What is all the more amazing about this speech is that Gandhi actually died in 1948.

So in conclusion, let me just reiterate my main points, which are (1) it is unprofessional to set fire to our supervisors, at least in Utah; (2) when pasta is outlawed, only outlaws will have pasta; and (3) we should not be critical of people who make extremely loud motorcycle noises in public if we are sporting penny loafers. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to “I Write the Songs.”

S
o I turned on my car radio, and the first thing I heard was the Shouting Car-Dealership Jerk. You know the one I mean. He sounds like this:

“BELOW DEALER COST!! MAX SNOTWICK FORD DODGE ISUZU CHEVROLET NISSAN STUDEBAKER TOYOTA IS SELLING CARS AT BELOW DEALER COST!! WE’RE LOSING MONEY ON THESE CARS!! WE HAVE TO MAKE ROOM FOR MORE CARS!! SO WE CAN LOSE MORE MONEY!! WE HAVE PROCESSED CHEESE FOR BRAINS!! THAT’S WHY WE’RE SELLING CARS FOR BELOW DEALER…”

I immediately did what I always do when the Shouting Car-Dealership Jerk comes on: I changed the station. I will listen to
anything
—including Morse code, static, and the song “A Horse with No Namt”—before I will listen to those commercials, and I think most people feel the same way. So the question is: Why are they on the air? Why are car dealerships paying good money for commercials that people hate?

My theory is that these commercials are NOT paid for by
car dealerships; they’re paid for by competing radio stations, who hope you’ll switch to them. I developed a similar theory years ago to explain the infamous “ring around the collar” TV commercials for Wisk. Remember those? They always featured a Concerned Housewife who tried and tried to get her husband’s collars clean; but when her husband, who apparently did not wash his neck, would put on a shirt, people would point out that his collar was dirty. You’d think he’d have punched them in the mouth, but instead he just looked chagrined, and these extremely irritating voices—voices that would kill a laboratory rat in seconds—would shriek: “RING AROUND THE COLLAR! RING AROUND THE COLLAR!” And the Concerned Housewife would be SO embarrassed that the only thing preventing her from lying down right on her kitchen floor and slashing her wrists was the fear that the paramedics might notice that she had waxy yellow buildup.

There was a time when the “ring around the collar” campaign was arguably the single most detested aspect of American culture. Many people swore that, because of those commercials, they would not purchase Wisk if it were the last detergent on Earth. Yet the commercials stayed on the air for
years
. Why? Because
somebody
was buying Wisk. The question is: Who?

My theory is that it was the Soviet Union. These ads ran during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets would stop at nothing to destroy America. I believe they sent agents over here with the mission of purchasing huge quantities of Wisk; this convinced the Wisk manufacturers that the “ring around the collar” campaign was working, so they kept it on the air, thereby causing millions of Americans to conclude that they lived in a nation of complete idiots, and
thus to become depressed and alienated. I believe that virtually all the negative developments of the sixties and seventies—riots, protests, crime, drug use,
The Gong Show—
were related, directly or indirectly, to Wisk commercials. I also believe that to this day, somewhere in the former Soviet Union, there are giant hidden underground caverns containing millions of bottles of Wisk.

I’ll tell you another kind of ad I hate: The ones where they give you information that could never be of any conceivable use to you. For example, there was a series of ads for some giant chemical company, I forget which one, where they’d show you, say, a family watching television, and the announcer would say something like: “We don’t make televisions. And we don’t make the little plastic things that hold the wires inside the televisions. We make the machines that stamp the numbers on the little plastic things that hold the wires inside the televisions.” When I saw those ads, I wanted to scream: WHY ARE YOU PAYING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO TELL ME THIS?? WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO??

I also do not care for:

• Any ad featuring a demonstration of a product absorbing an intimate bodily fluid.
  

• Any ad where a singer sings with deep emotion about something nobody could possibly feel deeply emotional about, such as cotton, Hoover vacuum cleaners, and Jiffy Lube. Builders Square has a commercial wherein the singer bleats this hyperpatriotic song that makes it sound as though the people shopping there are actually building America, whereas in fact they are looking for replacement toilet parts.
  

• Any of the endless series of ads by long-distance companies accusing other long-distance companies of lying. LISTEN, LONG-DISTANCE COMPANIES: WE DON’T BELIEVE ANY OF YOU ANYMORE. WE’RE THINKING OF GOING BACK TO SMOKE SIGNALS.
  

Excuse me for shouting like the Car Dealership Jerk; I get emotional about this. I’m sure you do, too, which is why I’m inviting you to wr
ite
to me at One Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132, and tell me—BRIEFLY—what advertisements, past or present, that you really hate, and why. I’ll write a column about this, which will benefit humanity in general by enabling me to write yet another column without doing any research. Don’t thank me: I do it all for you. At WAY below dealer cost.

W
hew! Do I have a headache! I think I’ll take an Extra Strength Bufferin Advil Tylenol with proven cavity fighters, containing more of the lemon-freshened borax and plaque fighters for those days when I am feeling “not so fresh” in my personal region!

The reason I’m feeling this way is that I have just spent six straight days going through the thousands of letters you readers sent in when I asked you to tell me which advertisements you don’t like. It turns out that a lot of you really, REALLY hate certain advertisements, to the point where you fantasize about acts of violence. For example, quite a few people expressed a desire to kill the stuffed bear in the Snuggle fabric-softener commercial. “Die, Snuggle Bear! Die!” is how several put it.

Likewise there was a great deal of hostility expressed, often by older readers, toward the relentlessly cheerful older couples depicted in the competing commercials for Ensure and Sustacal. These commercials strongly suggest that if you drink these products, you will feel “young,” which, in these commercials, means “stupid.” People were particularly
offended by the commercial where the couple actually drinks a
toast
with Ensure. As Jamie Hagedorn described it: “One says, To your health,’ and the other says, ‘Uh-uh—to OUR health,’ and then for some reason they laugh like ninnies. I want to hit them both over the head with a hammer.”

Some other commercial personalities who aroused great hostility were Sally Struthers; the little boy who lectures you incessantly about Welch’s grape juice; the young people in the Mentos commercials (as Rob Spore put it, “Don’t you think those kids should all be sent to military school?”); everybody in all Calvin Klein commercials (“I am sure they are what hell is really like,” observed Robert E. Waller); the little girl in the Shake ‘N Bake commercial—Southerners REALLY hate this little girl—who, for what seemed like hundreds of years, said “And I helped!” but pronounced it “An ah hayulpt!” (Louise Sigmund, in a typically restrained response, wrote, “Your mother shakes chickens in hell”); Kathie Lee Gifford (Shannon Saar wrote, “First person to push Kathie Lee overboard gets an all-you-can-eat buffet!”); the smug man in the Geritol commercial who said, “My wife, I think I’ll keep her!” (the wife smiled, but you just know that one day she will put Liquid Drāno in his Ensure); the bad actor pretending to be Dean Witter in the flagrantly fake “old film” commercial that’s supposed to make us want to trust them with our money; the woman in the Pantene commercial who said “Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” (as many readers responded, “Okay, how about if we just hate you because you’re obnoxious?”).

Also they are none too fond of the giant Gen X dudes stomping all over the Rocky Mountains in the Coors Light ads. (Matt Scott asks: “Will they step on us if we don’t buy
their beer?” Scott McCullar asks: “What happens when they get a full bladder?”)

Also, many people would like Candice Bergen to just shut up about the stupid dimes.

Also, I am pleased to report that I am not the only person who cannot stand the sight of the Infiniti Snot—you know, the guy with the dark clothes and the accent, talking about Infiniti cars as though they were Renaissance art. As Kathleen Schon, speaking for many, put it: “We hate him so much we wouldn’t buy one even if we could afford it, which we can’t, but we wouldn’t buy one anyway.”

Speaking of car commercials, here’s a bulletin for the Nissan people: Nobody likes the creepy old man, okay? Everybody is afraid when the little boy winds up alone in the barn with him. This ad campaign does not make us want to purchase a Nissan. It makes us want to notify the police. Thank you.

And listen, Chevrolet: People didn’t mind the first 389 million times they heard Bob Seger wail “Like a rock!” But it’s getting old. And some people wish to know what “genuine Chevrolet” means. As Don Charleston put it, “I intended to buy a genuine Chevy but I couldn’t tell the difference between the ‘genuine’ and all those counterfeit Chevys out there, so I bought a Ford.”

But the car-related ads that people hate the most, judging from my survey, are the dealership commercials in which the announcer SHOUTS AT YOU AS THOUGH YOU ARE AN IDIOT and then, in the last three seconds of the ad reads, in very muted tones, what sounds like the entire U.S. tax code. Hundreds and hundreds of people wrote to say they hate these commercials. I should note that one person
defended them: His name is George Chapogas, and he is in—of all things—the advertising business. Perhaps by examining this actual excerpt from his letter, we can appreciate the thinking behind the shouting ads:

“I write, produce and VOICE those ads. Make a damn good living doing it, too. Maybe more than you even. And would you like to know why? Because they move metal, buddy.”

Thanks, George! I understand now.

Well, I’m out of space. Tune in next week, and I’ll tell you which commercial the readers hated the most; I’ll also discuss repulsive bodily functions in detail. Be sure to read it! You’ll lose weight without dieting, have whiter teeth in two weeks by actually growing your own hair on itching, flaking skin as your family enjoys this delicious meal in only minutes without getting soggy in milk! Although your mileage may vary. Ask a doctor! Or somebody who plays one on TV.