Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: Difference between revisions

* Parodied and subverted in one episode of ''[[The Honeymooners]]'': Ralph and Ed are trying to sell a multi-function kitchen utensil on an infomercial. They only have two apples, so they don't practice coring them. When they're doing the actual commercial, Ed, in full [[Cloudcuckoolander]] mode, doesn't bother faking having trouble with the normal corer, and finishes in less than five seconds. Meanwhile, Ralph spends several minutes trying to get the product to work, growing increasingly frazzled.

* ''Mr Show''

** An episode features Janeane Garofalo as a woman who simply can't organize the bags in her kitchen, shouting, "Help me!" at the camera. The solution is "bag hutch," a box to put bags in. The writers had to change the name of the product because "bag box" was already the name of a product that did the exact same thing.

* [[Picnicface (series)|Picnicface]] featured a segment called "Infomercial Plus" - an infomercial actor agency that offers people Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket in real life to make your infomercial even better! Highlights included a literal blanket-operating failure, a man unable to comprehend fruit and another utterly incapable of cracking eggs.

* The ads for those little rubber caulk spreader things show someone who doesn't have their product using their finger to spread caulk, because they apparently have no cardboard or tools of any kind; additionally, the caulk already looks like it was applied by a pack of kindergartners offered a prize to the one who could apply the most caulk to the bathroom tiles. Most caulk is in fact ''supposed'' to be smoothed out by finger. Even if you don't want to get your hands dirty, you can always use a latex glove.

* The "Total Transformation Program", a "child behavior modification program" advertised just about everywhere, seems to be aimed at parents who aren't dealing very well with what sound like perfectly normal kids. "Have you tried screaming, punishing, pleading, and negotiating and your child still walks all over you?" Modern science ''has'' answers.

** Having studied this program in psychology classes, this troper found that the program really is meant for parents who are just that bad at working with normal teenagers... Since the "Trick" of the product is that the "Total transformation" is the parent, not of the kid.

* The [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2g4YBGn8i4 "Perfect Brownie pan"] commercial opens with a woman who can't seem to use a spatula when trying to remove what one can only imagine are cement brownies from a pan. She has apparently never heard of "greasing the pan".

* There's a pic that made the rounds on gaming forums a while back: It was from a Best Buy, where the employees had affixed stickers to all the copies of ''Call of Duty 4: [[Modern Warfare]]'' for Xbox 360 that cheerfully offered to "Let us install it for you!"

** Presumably they mean the Xbox 360 itself. A process which involves color matching a trio of cables to your television along with a power cord and Ethernet cable and should take about three minutes, tops. Or if you have an HDMI cable, takes less than thirty seconds, ten of which are spent making sure the cable's the right way.

** Here's how these things happen according to my retail experience (I never worked for Best Buy though): Someone in marketing/sales came up with the "Let us install it for you!" thing for software to improve sales among the computer-illiterate as well as spread the Geeksquad name around the store, and the bosses thought it was a solid idea. Merchandising printed out a billion of those stickers and the bosses (themselves mostly computer-illiterate) said "Stick these on all your best-selling software." The store managers (generally computer illiterate) pass the order down. The younger kids and gamers who work at Best Buy (the real computer literate ones) would mention how it's a stupid idea to put them on console games, but the manager would reply "Whatever, someone from upper management is coming next week and they want to see stickers."

** [http://www.gamesradar.com/ps3/playstation-3/news/best-buy-defends-charging-30-for-ps3-firmware-updates/a-2010100716412499069/g-20060314115917309058 It won't stop.] Now they're charging $30 for [[Play Station 3]] firmware updates. For readers who don't own a [[Play Station 3]], the update process is as follows: push left on the controller a few times until you get to the options menu. Select firmware update. Agree to terms and conditions. Wait a few minutes as [[Play Station 3]] automatically updates itself. Apparently this is esoteric enough to be worth $30 if you can do it.