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Oh, You Could at Least Try, for Chrissakes

I just saw a new Arby’s commercial on TV. It’s one of those that features their mascot, a talking oven mitt.

Now, never mind that they’ve chosen a talking oven mitt as their mascot. Certainly, it’s not the most creative choice, by any means. They might as well glue eyes and a mouth onto a ketchup packet, or a spork. An inspired choice, by no means. But that’s not my beef.

No, my problem is this — I just watched this commercial, with this talking oven mitt doing some zany thing or other, and it draws the attention of one of the employees. So, the conspicuously-unpimply actor pretending to be a burger jockey comes over, and says:

‘Hey, Oven Mitt, what are you doing?‘

‘Oven Mitt’. The oven mitt’s name is… ‘Oven Mitt‘. Oven. Freaking. Mitt.

Do these people really want to sell their nasty-ass bags of grease, or what?

Look, think about it. This is a big, hulking, multinational company, right? So you know they pumped a big fat pudgy bunch of money into this ad campaign. They must have had people inside the company working on it, and people consulting with the company working on it, and quite likely a whole team from some expensive marketing firm working on it.

And none of those fricking people could think of a better name for an oven mitt than… oh, lessee, what was that one again? Oh, right: Oven Mitt. Bunch of freaking dildos.

Seriously, how hard could this possibly be? You’ve already sleepwalked through the first half of your job by coming up with some half-assed Muppet from hell that you pulled off a towel rack in the kitchen. Now the frigging least you could do is to rub a couple of neurons together to give the damned thing a good name, right? Right?

Well, apparently not. Obviously, there are some ad people out there who are content to mail the whole goddamned thing in, and who pitched their lopsided oven mitt mascot monstrosity as ‘Oven Mitt’. That takes some pretty big stones, folks. I’m not sure what exactly you have to smoke to try getting away with that — presumably, these people got paid a lot of money, remember — but whatever it was, these puppies smoked it, went for it, and apparently pulled it off.

Maybe that’s what pisses me off the most — see, I’m a lazy-ass myself. But I don’t think I’d ever have the balls to drop into work and do the equivalent of what these marketards have done here. Hell, I don’t even know what the office-job equivalent of this train wreck would be. It’d be like walking into a big planning meeting with the boss and saying that our next project is just like a Post-It note. And then not explaining what in the hell that means. And then saying I’m working on ‘Project Post-It Note’ for six weeks, and then showing up one day with a pad of Post-It notes. And asking for a raise. Yeah, that’d be pretty close. Maybe not quite as ballsy, but near enough.

Anyway, I can’t decide whether the guys who ‘came up with’ the oven mitt named Oven Mitt are my new heroes, or just the latest sign that the world is being overrun by hordes of slobbering morons. Somehow, I think it’s both, but I can’t be certain. All I’m really sure of is this — between the ads and the mitt and all the rest of this nonsense. I am feeling no desire whatsoever to run out and find an Arby’s for a midnight snack. So whatever those marketing bastards think they’ve put together, it’s not working on me. ‘Oven Mitt’, my ass. Bastards.