…have you noticed the new trend in commercials: they start soft, then dial up the volume to a near-painful point. On my particular never-buy list: Bare Minerals. And Humana Supplemental health insurance for retired persons: I find it particularly insulting that they assume all of us over 60 are also deaf as posts and need to be shouted at.
Runner up: commercials that repeat phone numbers again and again and again, especially targeting old people. What do you think we can’t remember, or what? I have a long memory for annoying commercials.
I also have had it with commercials exhorting me to buy “now” or “today.” My answer: “I’ll buy, if ever, unlikely, since you have annoyed me in a very memorable way, when I feel like it.”
And stupid exaultation over stupid products. HD Sunglasses? Give me a break. HD. Yeah.
Why do I need TWO slap-choppers? Because they break?
I have a long list of “If they have such a low opinion of their target customer, what must the product be like?” companies.
Look up “HD” in a list of acronyms; such as http://www.acronymfinder.com/HD.html. You’ll find lots of H… Disease entries. I’m having fun trying to imaging what half-duplex sunglasses might be like 🙂
Even my mother, who is 90 and getting closer to profoundly deaf, but surviving with the world’s most expensive hearing aids, finds this tendency annoying. In the UK, where she lives, nearly all of the ads push the sound envelope to the max, and even though her intelligent aids compensate a bit, she always dives for the mute button whenever the ad break starts – meaning that she never hears the sound for any ads at all, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the intent.
Here in Australia, it isn’t so obvious (at least to me) that the sound level ramps up, but the shouting and dumbing down is the same – plus a new tendency to show the same ad, not just in every break, but twice in the same break, at the beginning and the end. Which, again, just gets me to put them on my “never ever buy from these people” list, along with the people who call me with unsolicited offers.
A TV comedy show here, called The Chaser, used to have a regular slot in each show called “scenes from the life of the crazy warehouse guy”, in which someone went into a store, office, fast-food outlet, and started shouting what they wanted in the same tones as the ads. Worth YouTubing.
Correction: The Chaser’s War on Everything: they got some worldwide exposure a few years ago when they all got arrested after (to their great surprise) succeeding in driving a mock security convoy and a limo containing one of them made up to look like Osama bin Laden through two security cordons around an APEC meeting.
Oh! my recent “favorite” was a dis-infomercial (wow, that actually passes the spellchecker???) for a paint sprayer. I’ve been working for 4 years now painting (mostly brush n roller, but some sprayer), so it was hilarious. Harping on the issues with paint rollers and brushes and claiming the sprayer was SOOO much easier and cleaner, but never EVER mentioning the issues with a paint sprayer. No mention of the cheap plastic motor that you have to haul around on a shoulder strap, never a mention of over-spray, thinning paint to make it work or using a different tip for stain, cleaning the dang sprayer, the fact that spraying takes ten times as long masking and taping…. UGH.
In the states, they repeat the same ads at every commercial break, so that I make a little list of products I actively hate.
I also surf the web with the sound off. I took a survey once on another site I visit, and it seems I’m not alone: 95% of those who responded have their sound off. So all the sites that feature news with talking heads are lost on me. And all the rackety commercials are mute when I view them, which usually I don’t: I window up something else, and do a measured task while the thing blatters away, and mostly through the talking heads. THey’re so slow. I can read the whole story faster than they can get their first sentence out.
Yes! Many of us have a list of annoying commercials, not just the ones with the sound dialed up to 11. My ‘favorites’ are the ones for drugs that never come out and say what they’re good for, but “ask your doctor.” Related to those are the inane ones for homeopathic headache remedy “Head-on: apply directly to forehead,” repeated nonstop for the duration of the commercial. They don’t want to know where I think they should apply their product!
Oh, and the closeups of pimples with the accelerating sound level: Proactiv, which they now say is ‘milder’ than the original, “but just as effective?” Oh, did they make the original caustic just for the amusement value?
The only paint sprayer I’ll recommend is the Wagner tank-based model with ten feet of hose that will take a couple or three gallons at a shot. Jane and I painted the whole garage in 4 hours, while my neighbor’s painter took a week on his, and on that big, non-masked job, it was great. It’ll be great on the fence when we need to do it again. With one of us on the ladder with the spray nozzle and the other moving the tank along as needed and using a brush to corral any ‘runs’, we did pretty good: used a big sheet of cardboard to prevent overspray onto the fence, (dark, to the garage’s light) and we were good. And fast. It was a 5 gallon job, plus some, and we only washed it once. Wash-up is the nasty part, the one that would keep me from using it for any small job.
I bought a secondhand paint sprayer, with the idea I would test it on the smallest bedroom, the ‘captain’s quarters’, which has some unfinished, rough Hardiboard. I thought the thinned paint would be sucked into the Hardiboard and seal it. The Hardiboard sucked it up, but the overspray was awful, and the Hardiboard never quite finished absorbing the paint. I got frustrated after an hour without real progress, and went to the hardware store and bought an old-fashioned 4″ brush. That properly finished the job 2 hours later. Scrubbing out the paint sprayer resulted in a broken spray tip, which was the end of that experiment.
I think you’ve tapped an artery here!
Lol: Wagner. The only brand I’ll buy. And no sprayer that’s handheld. Clogs are definitely your enemy, and if you’re working in hot sun, a standby bucket of water to prevent the paint drying on the nozzle while you pour in more paint into the hopper — is a good thing.
IMHO a one-room job is not enough to warrant the hour it takes to clean the sprayer, plus masking time, etc. For a garage interior, the sprayer is great. It drops a fine dust mist on the concrete, but a broom sweeps it away. For a really big job, like repainting a building, it’s a great thing. http://www.amazon.com/Wagner-Power-Products-515000-Sprayer/dp/B00009YUHK/ref=sr_1_cc_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1305676814&sr=1-3-catcorr
It’s not a bitsy machine. But faced with a major job, like a 2 car garage, oh yeah!
Heh. Maybe I’ll see if one is available for rental when I get around to repainting the house. The next major task will be scraping, sanding, sealing, and repainting the house trim; not a job for the faint hearted. It all needs a good cleaning, and was originally oil based paint, I think — at least that’s what the bloom and checkering tell me. It’s now coming off in unsightly weathered strips.
Oh my favorite weapon of choice for removing paint is definitely a heatgun. I got stuck redoing some shingle siding that the paint was almost falling off… except when you tried to remove it. 88 billion little chips of paint per shingle, one bit at a time sucks. A shot with the heat gun (just enough to warm the paint) and a good sharp scraper, and I could remove the stuff in a one-shingle sized hunk. Just be careful you don’t overheat or scorch!
I’ve used the old handheld Wagners (and intentionally LOST it, the vibrating motor in my hand was brutal and heavy) and a commercial sprayer I picked up used (park the motor, drop the short hose in a 5 gallon bucket and climb the ladder with the long hose-worked ok, but lot of paint wasted in the hose). My latest acquisition was a small cabinet/furniture sprayer by Earlex. NOT a whole-house sprayer, you load the finish in a quart sized container, and the motor sits over there while you spray. That one I can see myself getting a fair amount of mileage out of, it worked great for lacquering cabinets (even with the typical sprayer issues)
A heat gun was what my father used removing the umpteen coats of paint from the antique doors. It still took a long time – the paint wasn’t that interested in coming off, what with the multiple layers, and there were two sides and the edges to do on all the doors…. (Better than solvents, though: he had the doors on sawhorses in the garage.)
Oh, my latest in the escalating-sound annoying commercial candidates: the I-can’t-get-up people have achieved a commercial with sound that heads straight for that one nerve right over your eyebrow…aaaagh! I hate that commercial. Good product, crummy, alienating commercial.
My very favorite thing about having a DVR is not having to watch commercials anymore. 🙂 Also, I’m now watching more TV shows on Netflix, with no commercials. I’ve become a fan of British TV shows – they seem smarter than US ones. Or maybe it’s just that everyone sounds smarter with a British accent.
Oh, and my local Barnes and Nobles finally got Betrayer in stock – after I special ordered my copy.
We mute ALL TV commercials, and I keep the headphones plugged in but the set off my head when on the computer (so I can quickly pop them on my head in the event something comes up I actually want to hear). There are a number of products that I absolutely refuse to buy because I loathe their commercials. Sometimes we amuse ourselves by deciding which commercial to nominate for “Stupidest Commercial of the Year.”
Many years ago I had an entryway built onto my house_ new doors etc. Part of the contract was the initial painting which was done when I was out of the house.Evidently the ‘painters’ had just discovered sprayers. They wrapped yards of tape around the doorknobs -but left the locks bare. No other masking Painted the inside of the door – also several lampshades, and interesting footprints.
I was not pleased.
If I remember my statistics class from umpteen decades ago, surveys have long ago shown that TV commercials were in fact louder than the programming. That’s why I have a mute button on my remote.
If you use a heat source to remove paint, please please please be careful – or else move your computer records elsewhere before you burn down the house.
I truly stopped watching TV several years ago. I have nothing against it, I just don’t have the time. I watch occasional shows on DVD (All 8 seasons of Red Dwarf spread out over a couple months most recently, and now my Inner Voice is Dave Lister. That can’t be good.)
I don’t know how you and Jane find time to watch anything with all the other things in your lives. It’s all I can do to keep up with my work — Weekly DAZ 3D newsletter, Forward Motion, Vision and, you know, writing stuff. I feel like I’m perpetually behind on everything. If I took time out to watch stuff, I’d be years behind!
I just thank the good old BEEB that there are 3 channels I can watch with no ads ….. it’s a pain to have to watch commercial channels, though I have to watch Time Team on channel 4 …..
and adblocker on the internet!
We are fortunate in that we have a large number of public stations from Mass, Conn and RI which supply us with multiple stations. We generally record anything on broadcast or cable. Our zone out watching time is late afternoon; and, of course, fast forward through the commercials and station breaks.
What amazes me is that companies can spend millions on commercials that are inane and banal. The remnants of filmmaker in me will respond to something that is well made…..odd, humorous whatever. (Many a filmmaker has gotten his/her start in commercials.) On the other hand there are stores I will not patronize, items I will not buy due to their ads. OOPS! I’m beginning to rant!
Two slap-choppers, so you can give one away to someone who doesn’t know how to use a knife, and put the other in a recycling bin somewhere.
Not having a TV, I don’t have to deal with the commercials. Suits me fine – and the speakers on the computer are turned off except when I need to listen to something. I understand theaters have their sound systems turned up to at least 10 these days, but I don’t go there, either.