DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Perhaps I was caught off guard because I don’t often listen to the radio. Perhaps the millions of people who do listen to the radio are accustomed to this sort of thing, inured to the constant commercial braying of it, but my virgin ears still sometimes react involuntarily with shock and irritation.

Here’s my message to radio commercial producers: playing cellphone ringtones at the beginning of your commercial is a guaranteed mechanism for accomplishing two things:

1. Getting my attention.
2. Winning my contempt.

I was driving downtown when the commercial aired. The ringtone sounded just like my cell. They even managed to put some reverb on it so the phone sound seemed to come from elsewhere in the car than the speakers.

I reached spastically for the cellphone as I continued to navigate a left turn across the path of oncoming traffic. Simultaneously, I later thought, some percentage of other drivers listening to the same radio station were spastically reaching for their phones too. And I realized, there’s an ad producer somewhere congratulating himself on his clever trick of jarring listeners out of their commute-induced reveries… and across the county there are a couple thousand momentarily confused drivers narrowly avoiding accidents, picturing this self-satisfied but sadly deluded ad producer and thinking, “asshole!”