New adventures in toadying

An unfortunate byproduct of watching a lot of playoff baseball (and really, at this point I only seem to watch much of any sport -- OK, just hockey and baseball -- during its postseason, largely because it's more accessible) is having to sit through a lot of commercials. And a lot of the same commercial repeated to death.

Few commercials are ever good. Particularly for the non-Super Bowl division (and frankly, at this point the commercials are the only reason to watch the Super Bowl, or any American football for that matter, but that's a topic for another rant).

But some commercials are especially bad. Take a commercial for, well, I'm not sure what. (I do my damnedest not to pick up on the "product" being peddled, since that's what they want, and even if I did recall, it would only further serve the advertisers' purposes if I gave their wares free publicity. So I won't.) The whole message behind this campaign, I think, is that this product makes more things possible for business, which I think really means that corporate managers can use this product to further erode the places where their employees are relatively free of managerial oversight.

That in and of itself is bad enough. But the tag line for this is something to the effect of "Be a yes man," with various actors playing professionals reciting a line about how "I'm a yes man (or yes woman)".

Excuse me. Did they just confess to being a sycophant and take pride in it?

It's really sad that we live in a corporate culture (there's a contradiction in terms if ever one existed) where being a sycophant is something to be publicly proclaimed and boasted. I mean, I know they don't actually use that word, but they should. It'd at least make the spots comical, which would make them only slightly more bearable for me to have to watch.