March 5, 2016
Optimum is an internet/TV/phone company that routinely gives me such lousy service that I often have to write Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride from the gas station down the street. (And it shows- the Editors.)
They are running very annoying commercials at all hours of the day touting their excellent service. Ironically, their service is so bad I can only see those commercials when I am at the home of anyone else with better internet. Or at the gas station. I get better service stealing the gas station unsecured Wi-Fi than I do at home from Optimum.
The commercial begins with very serious-seeming people working on very serious-seeming stuff in a very serious setting that looks like NASA in every film you have ever seen.
The real NASA has technology about two decades older. That’s true.
How serious is this? It is so serious that these people have their fingers on the nuclear button! We’re through the looking glass, people.
Finally, they intone “Gamma is a go. Go for Gamma.” They turn their keys, push their buttons, and jump up and celebrate as the warheads launch towards North Korea. Finally, Kim Jung-un, it is put up or shut up time. No, no, not really.
They turn their keys, push their buttons, and jump up and celebrate as an old woman and a baby appear on their screens.
The woman then appears to have a stroke, making faces and odd clicking sounds at the baby, who seems to take delight in the old woman’s senility. Seriously, the woman seems less like she is trying to amuse the baby and more like she is sucking a lemon seed through a straw.
If this kid could talk he’d be calling 911.
The voice-over comes on and asks “Did we do all that just so you could make silly faces with Gamma?” Before you can say “how the heck do I know?” the voice-over answers “yes we did.”
Ah gotcha, they developed a high-tech system so you can do whatever you want, even terrorize your grandkid. Nice. Cool. WAAAAAIT A MINUTE.
Who is this ad aimed at? “Did we do all that just so you could make silly faces with Gamma?” Listen to the commercial, he emphasizes you. He’s talking to you.
So who is Gamma? I, and everyone else, assumes that Gamma is the old woman, Gamma being a cutesy way of saying Grandma.
So the voiceover is saying “Did we do all that just so you could make silly faces with your grandmother?”
The kid. They are talking to the kid. Optimum is telling all the babies in the audience, all the babies who pay their household’s cable bills, to switch to Optimum so they can see funny faces from grandma. This commercial is directed at infants.
Did Optimum really make a commercial for the babies who pay internet bills demographic?
The question is Imponderable.
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Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
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