BEWILDERED OLD MEN

I prize my intellect and I value my insights. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you how I feel about my continuing ability to cope – to cope with new realities, to experience new ideas, and to live in the 21st century. I have tried to express some of this feeling in my "Looking Ahead" blog. I do look ahead. I plan for the future, even though I understand the reality that I don’t have the same “future” as a thirty year old. Never mind all that. I am furious! I am disgusted! I have just seen one too many of those tasteless, ageist, insulting commercials on TV for TD Canada Trust.

You know the ones. Two borderline senile old guys sit on a bench trying to decide literally – which end is up. They aren’t stupid. They are just totally out of touch with to-day. They exemplify, in the opinion of TD or their advertising agency, the enormous gap between the hip, cool, with-it younger people, and the doddering old men who sit on a park bench and are totally incredulous that a bank will stay open on Sunday. The commercial has these two dodderers comparing what their watches say. “I think my watch is not working. What day does your watch say it is?"
"My watch says it’s Sunday." Aside from the fact that a date and time dial does not, at least I have not seen it, tell you what day it is because, obviously from year to year the date falls on a different day. Or is it just that I also am too old and feeble to know the difference.

I’ll admit that I don't own an IPad or a Smart Phone. I do not send text messages. I do send Email and I am reasonably computer literate. I, not having been born on the far side of the moon, which is where these two old farts seem to reside, do know my way around. I am presumably aware of what is going on around me. I read the newspapers. I watch TV news. I am au courant when it comes to ordinary and extraordinary daily events.

So I am insulted. I am, as a reasonably sapient man in his early eighties, upset that these two men, perhaps contemporaries of mine. Are so blindly and blithely out of touch with everyday reality.

From the earliest commercials with the two of them sitting on a park bench, to the one where a daughter appears and reminds her father that he doesn’t know how to give her financial advice, it has been sickening. Why there has not been greater outrage from the community of seniors – I just don’t know.

But wait, maybe there has been outrage Maybe I was looking the other way. Maybe those two old guys are really me and it makes me shiver to realize it all may be true.

Seriously. The commercial is all about poking fun at two elderly men. The saddest part is that is with their permission, in fact, given the talent fees they are getting (I hope their agent is “sticking it” to the client) maybe it’s all worth while. If you don’t mind selling out that is.