Your Commercials Do Not Speak to Me

I am extremely intelligent, and have an excellent attitude.

I have come to this conclusion from watching television commercials. I'm thinking of the one where an extremely frustrated woman is trying to use a fairly common product- say, a pair of scissors- to accomplish a fairly ordinary task, like cutting coupons from the newspaper. "Are you tired," a condescending but mildly sympathetic voice asks me, "of ordinary scissors?" "No," I reply, but he was being rhetorical. "They slip. They rip. They never work." "Maybe for you, Gerald Ford," I tell him. "They work just fine for me." But the woman is having a scissors crisis right on camera. Nay, a scissors-induced hysterical fit. Her scissors are not only slipping, ripping, and never working, but she has somehow gotten caught in a tangle of electrical cords, torn down both of her curtains, and is now flailing helplessly on the floor like an upended cockroach. This happens every time, we are led to believe, she even touches a pair of scissors.

Next, we will be shown a pair of scissors that are not only easy to use (without the unacceptable levels of ripping, slipping, et cetera), but evidently come with a subcutaneous Valium emitter, judging from the woman's expression. I wish, her facial expression says, my husband were a pair of scissors like these. I wish I lived on a spaceship shaped like these scissors, and I could fly my spaceship around the galaxy and pose for album covers. I'd change my name to Gamma Scissor-Ship.

I have seen this woman tear a pint of creamer in half trying to open it, spilling cream down her front. I recently witnessed her destroy a shirt and a plastic clothes hanger trying to put one on the other. It must have been her husband or a blood relation who spilled an entire quart of motor oil on his engine, shirt, and French poodle trying to top off his reservoir. The most pathetic part about that one was the way both he and the dog looked at me with a forlorn expression, as if to suggest that (a) this was somehow my fault and (b) couldn't there possibly be a better way?

I, personally, am not looking for a better way. I'm not tired of any of the things they're asking me whether I'm tired of. I don't have a problem with most of the things there's supposed to be 'NO' (in all caps) of, either: NO dieting! NO exercise! NO forms to fill out! NO phone calls! NO ointments to apply! What's wrong with exercise anyway? Often, the announcer, no doubt trying to be helpful, will fill in his own adjectives as he reads the NO list: NO complicated addition problems! NO irritating conversations with your wife! NO intolerable breathing without a respirator! Again, his perception of reality is very different from my own.

Surely these commercials are not being made without reason. I have too much faith in Madison Avenue and market research to think that they would be asking if I'm 'tired' of milk cartons if they didn't have excellent evidence that I (as the average consumer) was in fact tired of milk cartons. And ordinary clothes hangers. And every garden tool ever invented. And fly swatters. Hence my conclusion that the irate, despondent, and hopelessly confused 'typical consumer' shown while the announcer asks his questions is just that: a typical consumer.

This makes me feel pretty concerned about the future safety of our nation and our world-- are our steam shovels, missile silos, and trash barges being operated by someone who has nearly wept trying to put on an ordinary pair of rubber gloves?-- but pretty good about myself. I've mastered the ordinary dustmop, the emphatically non-user-friendly envelope ("They dry your tongue out! They taste horrible! They never stick! They rip in half and give you papercuts on your nose!"), the traditional gas cap. I am Einstein; I am da Vinci.

I am clearly not the target audience of this commercial. I shall change the channel.

.... as soon as I figure out this @#?! universal remote!