More on DirecTV.

You've doubtless seen those stupid ads for DirecTV - where a celebrity reads glowing letters supposedly sent by "real" subscribers, and we are intended to be impressed. Well, the celebrity doesn't so much "read" the letter as overemote over it. ("Jumpin' Jehosephat Yeehaw!" as Laurence Fishburne says. Yeesh.) And recently they've even gotten a real actor - Robert Duvall - to take part in the campaign. And I'm sure that the letters were written by real subscribers - real subscribers who work in DirecTV's marketing department, or are relatives or friends of such. Utterly unconvincing ads, and a waste of their money. But I suppose it's their money to waste.

It was a DirecTV service truck that I saw in Orlando last week that seemed to me to be the stereotype of DirecTV and its policies. I was on I-4, where the road was 5 lanes wide on my side. A small DirecTV service vehicle was in the next-to-left late with its left turn signal blinking. And with no one anywhere near in the left lane, he stayed in his lane, his left blinker flashing away merrily. Nothing new for Florida drivers, of course. After following him for a mile or two, I needed to get around him, and found that from the front, his left turn signal wasn't blinking. Not because he'd turned it off, of course; because he'd had an accident that had crumpled the left front quarter of his car. And the entire left side of his car, although that might have been from a different accident. And there he was, happily driving along at Interstate speeds in rain that alternated between drizzle and downpour, with a soda in one hand and a cell phone pressed to his ear in the other. (And how was he controlling the wheel? I decided I needed to put some distance and a couple of lanes between us before I found out to my dismay.) Why would DirecTV want Danny DeVito to represent them when they have this guy?