Cruel and Unusual

Many people consider one of the little perks of a job, being able to listen to the radio at work. I had that “perk” when I worked at Pizza Hut, but my following jobs in the music field supplied their own soundtracks, and then my first couple I.T. jobs were in offices where there was no music of any kind piped in, but I was always able to listen to my own music so it worked out great. Then I landed at my current job, and we actually have a pretty respectable office sound system! Woo! The default station was KPLZ, aka Star 101.5, playing “the best mix of everything”. For the first month or so this worked out okay. I had been somewhat out of touch with mainstream radio so it was actually kind of refreshing to let someone else do the driving and just listen.

Well, in all honesty, it was nice for about a week.

I started this job in September of 2006. One of the first things I noticed after a few days of listening to the radio, was that “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield was played 3 to 4 times during each and every workday. This was puzzling to me, because I remembered seeing her perform it on the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2005. Turns out the song was actually released in July 2005. Yet to the overlords at Star, it was still one of Today’s Hottest Hits! As of a month ago when I was finally successful in lobbying for a station change, it was still being played, on average, three times between 8am and 5pm. They may have slowed it down for a few weeks, to only playing once or twice per day, but it has been in constant rotation for what is now approaching three years. This is just one of the less annoying examples. Those complete wastes of airwaves, Gwen Stefani’s “Sweet Escape” and “Hollaback Girl” are truly painful to listen to even once. Drill them in to someone 4 times a day (each) for 9 months, and the idea of taking a shotgun to the overhead speaker was getting very tempting. It actually got so bad that I kept a log for a week of what they played, and it was very eye-opening to me and others in the office. Apparently the other had kinda noticed that they played lots of repetition but hadn’t actually realized that it was ROTTING THEIR BRAINS AWAY FROM THE INSIDE OUT painfully annoying.

Luckily, thanks to my educational efforts, one day about a month ago, our HR manager came over and asked me if I’d go switch it to Jack because she couldn’t handle being tortured by Gwen Stefani (it was really hard to show her the respect of capitalizing her name) any more. At the end of the day, everyone agreed that it was a switch for the better, and we’ve been Jacked at work ever since. Just as I’m typing this, they just went from The Blues Brothers to Def Leppard, and we haven’t had a song repeat during the same day since we started listening. It would be just about perfect if only…

...if only...

…if only they handled their ads the same way they handle their music!

I know that they need to play the ads to get the revenue to keep playing what they want. That’s fine. My real problem lies with the advertisers themselves, who seem to take the Star philosophy to heart, and hammer us over the heads with the most brainless advertisements imaginable. Sadly, this trend also built over the 18 months of pre-Jack listening. Before I go into the ad that’s really under my skin (like those alien take-over-til-you-die worms from the X-Files) I’ll say that I am VERY happy that Jack has mostly different ad clients than Star did. But they have one prominent one in common: Weisfield Jewelers.

For many years, Weisfield had pretty decent ads… Classic jingle-based ads that were actually pretty decent stand-alone tunes. Then a year or two ago, they decided that they didn’t want people singing their jingle, they wanted people cursing their very presence on the Earth. And they produced a series of ads where a girl named “Lisa” is gushing to her girlfriend about her amazing new Earrings/Necklace/Bracelet/Ring. (fyi, it JUST came on right now…) As soon as Lisa’s friend says she can’t believe how gorgeous this jewelry is, Lisa says “I Know!” and then we cut to her husband Brian, who is in a bowling alley with his guy friend, telling him about how Lisa was speechless when he gave her the Weisfield jewels. It cuts back and forth with Lisa telling her girlfriend all about how she received her amazing gift. Inevitably, she says something like “as soon as I saw the Weisfield box…” at which time she is interrupted by the girlfriend who demands to know, “How did he know about Weisfield?” Then it cuts to the bowling alley, where Brian tell his good friend that his Dad told him about Weisfield. Or rather his mom told his dad to tell him. We men couldn’t be trusted to find our way to Weisfield without our mommy’s help. Ya know, because, like there isn't a Weisfield in EVERY SINGLE MALL IN THE NORTHWEST...

Then he – right there in the bowling alley – tells his manly chum that after Lisa was speechless, she “started getting all teary-eyed, and I’m thinking thank you Dad, for recommending Weisfield.” Not only is that a completely ridiculous line for two guys out bowling, he says it with such a phony smiley smarminess that it comes off sounding completely, uncomfortably, undeniably, GAY. To top that off, Lisa’s girlfriend says “I still can’t imagine YOU being speechless…” and Lisa says “well just look at the earrings (or) necklace (or) bracelet (or) ring!” To which the girlfriend does the audio-equivalent of melting into a puddle of plumbing sludge and says “Yeaahhhh…”

If you haven’t gone off to vomit yet, thanks for staying with me. This ad constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. With Mother’s Day only days away, it’s in heavy rotation all over the radio dial. They always ramp up the airtime when there’s a gift-giving event aimed at women coming up. Hopefully after this weekend they’ll give it a rest for a while.

But on the music side, things are great! Just heard Nirvana, Supertramp, and now Genesis. Haven’t heard Natasha or Gwen all week, and I’m not missing them one bit!