Chad Shawver
9/1/2008
Prof: Ordover
Polemic
One thing that really grinds my gears and I am sure the gears of the rest of America is late night T.V. Now a little more specifically about late night T.V. are the thirty thousand love chat line commercials. I mean it’s like every other commercial has some rejected model girl or guy trying to scrap a living off of annoying the general public and more importantly myself. And now these Satanic advertisers have tried to extend their influence even further, to America’s lethargic community, by adding texting into the mix. Given today’s society where everyone and the mother has a cell phone they think that this is the best way to reach out and scam the young minds of this country. Now, I am all about free market and free advertisement but these commercials pray on our country’s most fragile asset, young juvenile minds. These are lies all lies and I protest with a vivid passion and absolute hatred towards those sleazy scam artists.
All of these 45 second commercials are just so not American. Besides being completely unbearable and repugnant it’s almost like prostitution. Calling and texting prostitution if there were such a thing this would be it. One other thing, when you call or text now you don’t even get a person, which is false advertisement in my book, you are stunted with a recording that promises the time of your life. How could you have the time of your life with a recording? All the while listening to the recording and texting back to some automated computer system you are being charged unfathomable amounts of money. All of that is utter blasphemy. Now true story, I was 8 and I was so intrigued and conned into one of these commercials and was on the phone for 30 seconds and hung up because my 8 year-old mind was too scared for fear of my parents catching me. You see my juvenile mind hadn’t realized that grown-ups get bills every month and one of them just happened to be a phone bill. Come to find out, minutes after my parents had opened it, the phone bill was one hundred dollars more than usual and needles to say my overseers were not too pleased and boy did I get punished. So not only are they a useless and monotonous part of late night television, their unceasing barrages of catchy jingles that only serve to drive every viewer insane. Furthermore, its 45 seconds of the so called person you going to talk to or text with repeating themselves begging you to call and giving you the number over and over again. Now, if you like me you just can’t turn off the T.V for fear of missing your feature presentation. And muting doesn’t work because they are the same commercials every time and in the back of your mind you know what their saying and you find yourself in your mind repeating what they are saying. They are like that annoying song that gets stuck in your head and seems to never go away. So whether you want to or not you know the words and what’s coming next so muting is in other words pointless.
Now America is a free country and we do have freedom of the press. But for me this freedom has gone too far. It is a legal scam that prays on unsuspecting minds. They are like sexual predators except there not after your physical self just your money or your parent’s money. Just the sheer amount and variety of these late night chat lines is preposterous. Of course every single one “claims” to be free but that obviously is far from the reality of the situation. You call for one minute and get charged $100. Free? I think not my fellow companions. This tyrannical scam shouldn’t be allowed and should be outlawed by an act of congress. No one especially myself would be more pleased and satisfied if I never saw one of those 45 second lies again. They lie, they interrupt your show, and they prey on the feeble minded. It’s like trying to sell an item to a patient with Alzheimer’s. It’s ethically and morally wrong and really grinds the heck out of my gears.