As a high school student, I briefly considered a career in advertising.
There wasn’t really any compelling reason why, other than that I had to tell the guidance counselor something and it was the first thing to come to mind.
If memory serves, we were given an assignment to research a career we’d like to pursue and write a report on it. Being 15 and clueless, I guess I made my choice alphabetically. Even as a teenager, I knew I’ll never be cut out to sell anything, and accounting was so far out of the question as to be laughable.
But several commercials that have been in heavy rotation recently have served to remind me that choosing journalism over advertising was definitely the right call.
By now, just about everybody has seen those DirecTV commercials with the marionette family, right? Maybe it’s just because marionettes have always given me the heebie-jeebies, or maybe the whole premise is just plain wrong, but either way I’ve seen enough.
The spots are selling the company’s new Wireless Genie, a DVR without wires. The product itself sounds like a great idea. Who doesn’t love the thought of fewer cords knotting themselves up and gathering dust behind the TV stand or dangling from the wall-mounted flatscreen like acrobatic snakes? But the commercials have gotten progressively worse, going from weird to just plain creepy.
I didn’t like the first ad — where the human dad and his buddy’s discussion about ugly wires takes a turn for the awkward when the marionette wife enters the room carrying a pitcher of lemonade and glasses on a tray. I got the point, and the joke, but I wrote it off as not my cup of tea. I just couldn’t get past the nagging question of how the wife was able to arrange everything so neatly on that tray if she couldn’t pour the lemonade without making a mess of it. Not to mention the question of who’s pulling the strings. But, I let it go, realizing that searching for logic in a commercial featuring a talking puppet was probably not the most productive use of my time.
My eyebrows raised a little higher in the second ad, where the dad, after continuing to run his mouth about how ugly wires are, finds himself having to undo the damage he’s done to the fragile ego of his big-headed Pinocchio of a son. After talking the kid down, father and son leave the room together, only for the kid to be jerked into the air when his wires get tangled up in a ceiling fan.
This guy is a lousy husband and father. Not only is he so insensitive that he blathers on and on about how ugly wires are all day while living with a house full of puppets, but who would be dumb enough to raise a marionette child in a house full of ceiling fans? Sounds like borderline child abuse to me.
But the newest ad is the one that creeped me out enough to write about it. This
No matter how hard DirecTV tries, a puppet in lingerie is never going to convince me to buy its wireless DVR service. It will, however, give me nightmares. – Photo provided
time the husband is lounging on the bed watching TV, when the puppet wife comes in, wearing a bathrobe, and asks if he still thinks she’s pretty. You see, apparently this moron still hasn’t figured out that he’s causing his wife and child mental anguish and hurting their self-esteem by griping about a few wires that bring the magic of television into his home. Maybe the whole series of ads is just a fantasy this guy has concocted in his head. I’d be OK with that, since I can’t see how any woman in her right mind would willingly decide to spend the rest of her life with such an insensitive, self-centered dolt.
After half-heartedly reassuring his wife that she’s still attractive, she then decides to get a little “grown-up time” started by tossing the robe aside (don’t ask me how she manages to pull that off without getting it tangled in her strings) and dancing around in a nightie. Ick!
Look, I’m a very open minded person. Whatever any consenting adults decide to do in their own homes is their own business. I just don’t need to know about it. I can’t help but wonder if whoever pitched the idea for this latest commercial didn’t let a little too much information about his or her personal life slip through in the process.
Maybe DirecTV wins in the end. After all, I’m writing about their creepy commercials, and when I mentioned the topic of this week’s column in the office, everybody immediately knew what I was talking about. But I can have the last laugh. I’ll just use my old-fashioned DVR — wires and all — to fast forward from now on.
N’uh Uh is a weekly column written by reporter Andrea Agardy. She can be reached by email at tnrept03@lcs.net or on Twitter @swimswithsnark.
WAVEFake beggar Gary Thompson pretends to be wheelchair bound, mentally handicapped and claims to make $100,000 a year panhandling.
Beggars can’t be choosers — unless they’re really good at their game.
Kentucky’s bogus beggar is back on the streets after promising to stop scamming Good Samaritans with his sob stories and fake disabilities — a job that he claims puts $100,000 in his pocket every year.
A WAVE 3 reporter caught Gary Thompson at his old tricks in Louisville on Wednesday.
“M, m, money,” Thompson said in a slurred voice before changing back to his normal voice a split second later.
“I gotta go y’all, gotta make some money,” he said with a smile.
Cops say Thompson hoodwinks sympathetic strangers by pretending to be confined to a wheelchair and deliberately slurring his speech so it seems like he has a mental disability. Using his degree in speech pathology to perfect his voice, he’s reportedly hit towns in Ohio, Kentucky and Texas. He’s been arrested at least nine times in Kentucky, according to Lex18.
From his jail cell, he promised to stop clowning around.
WAVE He’s been spotted in towns in Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas.WAVE ‘I not faking nothing,’ the man told WAVE 3, while insisting the reporter put the camera away. WAVE A WAVE reporter caught Thompson standing up and joking around with friends.
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“I won’t do it anymore. I’m definitely done panhandling. Definitely,” he told WBKO.
But he hasn’t stopped playing the game. Thompson’s called his act an “addiction.”
In downtown Louisville, he was caught panhandling in front of McDonald’s and a gas station convenience store. He changed his clothes often to fit into the scenario. WAVE spotted him with a group of men, buying and selling small white pills.
The man wheeled over to a reporter with a hidden camera.
“Please help, fell out of my wheelchair today, all my coins, somebody take it,” Thompson said. “Need bus fare get back home.”
When the reporter asked him what had happened, Thompson replied, “Hit by truck 9-year-old, but I no hurt that bad, left side,” he said.
It was a small glimpse of the truth. The Austin, Texas native lost his mobility after getting into a car crash. He got $2.5 million from a settlement with Honda, but ended up blowing all of that money.
The man was spooked when the reporter pulled out a camera and began recording.
“Not doing no deal,” Thompson said. “Put me off camera don’t want to be on camera. I don’t do nothing wrong.”
“I not faking nothing,” he said, giving the reporter a wink after the camera was turned off.
WAVE Fake beggar Gary Thompson pretends to be wheelchair bound, mentally handicapped and claims to make $100,000 a year panhandling. 
WAVE