How Car Insurance Makes Me Feel Old

This one requires a long walk folks, so if you’re up to it, grab my automated nacho shoveling device (hand) and join me on a journey to the land of um...feel,..um,....old-dom.

I find the overly competitiveness of car insurance companies to be quite comical. I’m reminded of this almost constantly, I’d venture to guesstimate that 2/3rds of all ads I currently see have to do with car insurance. On nearly every billboard, tv commercial, radio commercial, port-a-jon, not to mention the web, you are constantly being inundated with ads for car insurance.

You have the Geico Gecko, Cavemen, Progressives quarky “Flo”, State Farm, Farmers, All-State (with that black guy,...can’t think of his name), Esurance and even that little general guy . That little general guy seems kinda iffy, kinda scammy but that’s a topic for another day....

Those are just the companies I can name off the top of my head. YES, I’ve been so repetitively exposed to car insurance ads that I can name SEVEN of them off the top of my head, and even several of the mascots.

I find this level of over advertising funny in its specificness. It’s not insurance, it’s not cars, it’s specifically car insurance. And they are all out to save you oh-so-much money, or so they claim.

The best way I can explain why this specificness is so funny to me would be to say, imagine a world where dozens of giant companies existed that only sold salad forks. Not spoons, not knifes, not even forks in general, but specifically SALAD FORKS. Now imagine every advertisement you see pertains to how much money you could save per year on salad forks. That’s kinda how I see them.

Still with me? Still holding onto my nacho consumption aid (hand) ? Good.

All of this overly competitive advertising leads me to think of the only other example of completely oversaturated and seemingly unnecessary advertising in my life. The old long distance commercials. I can still hear the pitch echoing through the empty cavern that is my brain, “Just dial down the center! 1-800-C-O-L-L-E-C-T”

And now time for another jump, this old ad war makes me realize that kids today have no idea what calling collect means. Most live without landlines, and have no concept of what it was like living with a non cell phone in the house. To them, phone = cellphone, period.

They have no concept of local vs long distance, can’t fathom being tethered to not only the house you are in with your phone, but in my case, the hallway of said home. Like a dog on a chain in the backyard. You could only go as far as your curly plastic leash would let you.

Long distance was really damn important too:

Person A: I was attacked by a polar bear with laser beams for eyes and chain saws for arms! I need a tourniquet really bad could you ple-

Person B: (Politely covering the receiver of the phone*) It’s my grandma, long distance...

Person A: Oh, I’m SOOO SORRY!! Tell her I said ‘HI’

Then everyone would sit around bleeding to death from their polar bear related wounds and watch in awe as someone talked to someone else literally all the way OUTSIDE OF CITY LIMITS! Isn’t technology amazing?

Long distance was so important that it didn’t merely invade tv (before the days of the dvr so you couldn’t fast forward through the commercials!**), radio, billboards, busses, everywhere. These companies would even call you directly. They would normally call during dinner right after your mouth was full of celery and peanut butter.

Janet: Hi, I’m Janet***, calling from MCI, my job is to call people all over the U.S and get yelled at and pray that one out of every 100 yell fests ends in a sale so I can make an extra 25 cents this hour, how are you this evening sir? Are you happy with your current long distance provider?

You: (Mouth full of celeray and peanut butter) mmmmrgggrrmmmcrunchmmrrmmggnocalllistmggrm

Janet: Great! you’re all signed up for the ‘Eiffel Tower Plan’ it will cost twice as much as your current plan but you can now call Southern France for only 30 cents a minute!

Janet: (Forgetting to hang up the phone) HEY GUYS I GOT A SALE!!! I REALLY GOT A SALE!!

Then you would hang up and your wife or husband would yell at you for changing your family's long distance plan for the fourth time that week.

I know what you’re thinking,....but Grandpa Smitty, why didn’t you just ignore the phone call?

Oh you silly little humanling...you couldn’t NOT answer the phone! You just couldn’t, and I never knew why...I never got the chance. It could be the President or the Pope (prolly calling about your current long distance plan) or something you had no idea, and only ONE ringtone...that you couldn’t change....

I never risked not answering the phone, the consequences would be too dire. The only chance I would get would be when I was home alone, and it would most likely be my mom who, if I didn’t answer would be in a panic, because “WHY DIDN'T YOU ANSWER THE PHONE?, you can’t JUST NOT ANSWER THE PHONE!”

Not only did you not know who the phone call was from, but you didn’t know who it was FOR either. Some fancier kids had a magical device called “Caller ID” but we didn’t. Caller IDs were for pussies.

So if the call wasn’t for you# you had to perform the ‘call for someone else ritual’. You either had to just leave the phone there. This would leave the person on the other end dangling like a slinky hanging from the ceiling. Then you would frantically search the house for the person the caller wanted to speak with. The other option would be to just stand there and yell (because you were tethered there remember?) “MOM!!! PHONE!!!!” and hope they heard you.

I forgot to mention you had to say ‘May I ask who is calling’ and if you didn’t the person you finally found hiding in the attic would sigh and say, “Why didn’t you ask who is calling?!”

If the person wasn’t there another ritual began, you had to say “I’m sorry he/she can’t come to the phone right now can I take a message?”

You had to say it like that otherwise this person would know you were home alone and they would come over and eat you or something...

Then you would pretend to take their message and forget about the phone call entirely until your mom or dad got another call from the person who was now angry. And then you would get grounded/yelled at. Good times.

If no one was home a device with a little midget cassette## in it would save useless rambling messages on a strip of magnetic tape. Then everyone would stand around the machine and try to guess who called.

Family Member One: “That sounds like our neighbor down the street....”
Family Member Two: “No, no that was totally Mr. Blahblah....”
Family Member Three: “Weren’t you expecting a call from Mr. Soandso?”

No definitive answer would come so the only sensible action would be to call every suspect and leave messages on their machines thus spreading the virus to everyone.....in case you hadn’t guessed, answering machines were awesome.

If the person you were trying to call didn’t have an answering machine the phone would just ring and ring forever until you hung up. The person you called would never know you called. No one could immediately contact anyone who say, ventured out to buy groceries. Even scarier, if they didn’t have an answering machine no one knew where they were,....at all! (I just blew your mind didn’t I?)

Without an answering machine that person might as well have been on Mars.

FBI: I’m sorry ma’am, we can’t find your father

Poor Woman: Oh no! Why not!

FBI: He doesn’t have an answering machine,....

Everyone:

FBI: He could literally be ANYWHERE

So you would just keep calling them, every 15 minutes and hope they hadn’t died. Why 15 minutes? Because that’s just what you DID, kinda like the reason you always had to answer the phone.

You would give it a month or so before you really started to worry.

Another fun game I liked to call ‘Phone Chicken’ was when everyone in the house heard the phone ring and everyone assumed everyone else was going to get it. With each passing ring the tension rose until either everyone answered the phone at the same time or no one answered resulting in the following argument:

    Family Member A: HOW COULD YOU NOT ANSWER THE PHONE!!!???
    Family Member B: You were closer!
    Family Member C: Well I just figured it was Mr. Whoever, he usually calls this time of day...
    Family Member A: Well @#$%! lets go check the answering machine....

And so we come to the end of our journey, maybe you forgot where we started, or don’t really know how you ended up here, but now you hopefully have a better idea of why everytime I see a car insurance commercial I feel old.

I make the quick jump from car insurance to feeling old, because no one under the age of 10 will know the true importance of a long distance call, or any of the lost rituals involved with the infamous “Home Phone”.

But at what point is the cut off? This is a fun game, sit around a table with a group of people of all ages, a cell phone starts to ring, the older phone vets will all become tense,...memories of ‘Phone Chicken’ still aching in their bones, the younger ones have no problem letting it go to voicemail......the vets thinking ‘MY GOD! ISN’T YOUR KID GONNA ANSWER HER PHONE! HOW CAN SHE NOT ANSWER IT!!!???’


* = YAH! I KNOW! The phone went all the way from your ear to your mouth! Huge!
** = Simply barbaric huh? And yet I survived...
*** = "Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty",...yep a Janet Jackson reference no one will get,...good for me...
# = everyone in the house shared the SAME phone! Is your mind blown yet?
## = sorry grandkids all teach you about cassettes in another blog....