“Thank you for calling So-and-So Corp., please listen closely as our menu options have changed.”

If i hear this one more time, i am going to dip my phone in marinara sauce and eat it. What is going on here? Are companies changing their menu options each week? What is this, a high school cafeteria? Clearly their only goal is to force you to listen to the entire recording, because heaven forbid we choose the wrong option or pretend like we already know where we want our call to be directed.

If I owned a company, you’d get a message like this:

“Welcome to Bryan Inc, we trust that since you were compentent enough to pick up a phone and dial our number, chances are you are familiar with how to use a menu system. We are also confident that you realize that a prerequisite to making a choice on the menu is that you actually know where that choice leads. With that being said, have a nice day.

If you would like to speak to Customer Support, please Press 1
If you would like to speak with Technical Support, please Press 2
If you would like to speak with Technical Customers, please Press 3
If you have a Customer Technicality, please Press 4
If you are not calling from a touch-tone phone, please hang up and smash your phone with a ball peen hammer.
If you are calling from a touch-tone phone, don’t be too proud of yourself, we all have them now.
If you can’t undestand this dialect, Press 5
If you like the number 6, Press 6
If you would like to speak to an operator, which we know you do, tough luck.
If you think you should have pressed option ’2′, Press 7
If you think you should have pressed option ’7′, it’s too late.
If your question involves the words “malfeasance”, “truncate”, or “proscuitto”, Press 8
For all other deli meats, Press 9.
If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, Press #.
If you enjoy being jerked around, please say “operator” into the mouthpiece until you are transferred.
If you can’t remember why you even called Bryan, Inc, please press *
If none of these menu choices were applicable, please hang up and call back in 10 minutes, as our menu options will probably be changed.

Have you seen the Chevy commercial with the Pickup Truck full of 5 ethnically diverse guys off-roading through a desert? The goofy white guy in the back seat is singing along to Shania Twain’s “Man I Feel Like a Woman” while everyone else in the car offers snide looks and disgust at the fact that he not only knows all the words, but that he is getting a little too into it. The commercial wants you to sympathize with these riders and give your own dirty looks to the confused crooner, but I’m not buying it. To me, he’s the last person at fault in this situation. First off, the guy driving the car is the guy who should be smacked. It’s his car, he shouldn’t have Shania Twain on. I don’t care if its a CD or the Radio, turn it off. Likewise, the guy riding shotgun has an obligation to take over the stereo in situations like this. It’s part of your responsibilities as a shotgun rider. And thirdly, the fellow backseat passengers, if they were real friends, would smack this guy on the arm and tell him to knock it off because he is making a jackdonkey of himself. So basically I walk away from this commercial feeling bad for the guy singing Shania Twain because he has lousy friends.

I don’t want you to buy into the American Idol hype. I don’t myself. But hype is different than delivering, and this show delivers. What does it deliver? I’m not sure. But it does deliver.

I’ve said before that it is a clever show because it creates a fan favorite with a huge fanbase in the amount of time it takes an average musical talent to write 10 songs. In 6 months you go from being a industry nobody to platinum record sales. it’s brilliant.

But you know what would be even more brilliant? How about using AI to launch you from nobody to somebody, and then jumping ship before they can lock you into signing on the dotted line? It’s no secret that many in the industry view the contracts awarded to Idol winners as restrictive, but most agree that it is worth it when you consider the instant pub one also gets. But what if you used the show to make a name for yourself, and then went on to do your own thing?

Even more clever, what if you used the fact that you were leaving the show and wrapped it in mystery to create additional interest in you? This past week Mario Vazquez’s name has been on the front page of the USA Today, CNN.com, and my blog. Pretty impressive trifecta. Noone knows why he left, and I think he likes it that way. I don’t know if I’m ready to give him or his management folks this much credit yet, but what if this was all a publicity stunt to surround him with more attention and then strike while the iron is hot. If his debut album comes out in 2 months and it’s titled “My Secret”, i think we’ll have all the proof we need.

Chances are he’s got a skeleton in his closet (perhaps something related to the fact that he sang backup for Michael Jackson in the 90s??…yes thats true), but it’s interesting to think at how this could play out if he was trying to use American Idol the way it uses the talented kids who perform on the show. If so, I say more power to him.

And as far as me not buying into the hype, well i guess this blog entry kinda disqualifies me for that. Oh well. I tried.

i was thinking the other day of a few things that were overrated and underrated in our society these days. thought i’d share:

overrated: toothpicks, underrated: paperclips

overrated: TV, underrated: reading

overrated: Wet-Erase Boards, underrated: Dry Erase Boards

overrated: Wheaties, Underrated: Cheerios

overrated: Apple Juice, underrated: Pineapple Juice

overrated: rocking chairs, underrated: ottomans

overrated: birthday parties, underrated: super bowl parties

overrated: 3-way calling, underrated: caller ID

overrated: dimes, underrated: pennies

overrated: hair gel, underrated: hair wax

overrated: ESPN2, underrated: ESPNews

overrated: cashews, underrated: almonds

outty…

The Sports Guy is running an intern contest, of which I am not a part. But I’d like to play along at home if he doesn’t mind. He pared down the group of finalists from 25 to 16 based on their answers to the question, “If you were running (the fictional) ESPN6, what would you put on the network?”. The intern contestants came up with some pretty good stuff, and it got me thinking. Here’s a few shows I’d like to see.

Bully – the premise is simple: everyone hates bullies. even bullies hate bullies. That’s why they bully, because they don’t want to be bullied. anyway, the show will have 4 main characters, all bullies. A 16-yr old bully, a 23-yr old bully, a 32-yr old bully, and a 60-yr old bully. You’ll get to know and love them throughout the season. Each week we’ll go to a new venue: a high school were a scrawny math nerd always loses his lunch money to the popular jock, a college where some frat guys pick on their tutor, a workplace where an ex-football player likes to punch everyone in the office to impress the secretary, and even a nursing home where the guy with two good legs likes to crack wheelchair jokes at the less mobile. Each week we’ll find a bully who needs a good beating and we’ll provide it. Our bullies will be the best, and each week you’ll feel satisfied that you just spent the last 30 minutes watching our society being improved right before your own eyes.

That’s my baby! This one will make for great TV. You know how you cringed when Ron Artest jumped into the stands to maul a fan? Remember that shocked look on your face when Todd Bertuzzi committed a felony on the ice? Remember how sorry you felt for A-Rod when he slapped Bronson Arroyo’s hand like a little girl? Well, as uncomfortable as those moments made you, just think about how it made their parents feel. Ten times worse. And ESPN6 will bring those reactions right into your living room with That’s my Baby!. You’ll get to relive some of the most horrific moments in sports through the eyes of the parents of the people responsible. We’ll play the tapes over and over again, sometimes in slow motion, until they beg us to turn it off. The pilot episode will feature Randy Moss’s mom shrieking like an eel as he faux-moons the state of Wisconsin and Tonya Harding’s dad breaking down into a ball of mush as he watches Nancy Kerrigan get pummeled by a goon over and over again. good times.

Stacked Deck: What do you get when you cross Celebrity Poker Showdown with Punk’d? Besides the lovechild of Dave Foley and Ashton Kutcher, you get Stacked Deck. We’ll capitalize on the hype that televised poker has taken on and take it to the next level. Each week we’ll host a celebrity poker tournament that appears to be legit on the surface. But watch the mayhem that ensues when Clay Aiken makes a straight on the river to beat Ice Cube 3 hands in a row. You haven’t seen a real poker showdown until you’ve seen Warren Sapp so angry that he’s got Paula Abdul in a Full Nelson. You’d be angry at Paula too if she was playing in your game and got dealt pocket Aces in six straight hands! We stack the deck so that someone looks awfully shady, and then we let nature take it’s course. You’ll never cheat in poker again after this exhilirating half hour of hyjinx!

Teacher’s Lounge: Ever wonder what gets said in the Teacher’s Lounge at your local high school? So did we. So we set up hidden cameras and recorded it all, every last word. But we didnt stop there of course, we wanted to let the students enjoy our footage too. So pop some popcorn and take a seat. You havent lived until you’ve seen a 150-lb English teacher call the school’s starting quarterback a “dumb-as-dirt sissified poser”, only to be confronted about it the next day and wet his pants in front of his whole class. It’s fun for the whole family.

Well, i guess that’s all i got. until next time…