Life on the Fourth Floor


	<a href="http://guide.comicgenesis.com/newshack.php">Newsbox</a>

What the Hell is a WaMu Anyway?

Posted 12:00 (GMT) 27th August 2008 by David J. Bishop

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one. A short bald man walks into a bank and says "Excuse me, you have a checking account that's free. Really?" "Yep, the WaMu free checking account," says the pretty red-headed woman behind the till. As names for free checking accounts go, this one is pretty imaginative. She goes on: "Comes with free cheques for life and free ATM cash withdrawals." But by this point, the man isn't listening. He's lost in his own little world where he's driving down a highway in the sun, the wind in his hair (yes, he suddenly sprouts long hair out of his bald head) and Twisted Sister blaring on the radio, not a care in the world. He pounds his fist in the air triumphantly and as the car speeds away we see the licence plate reads 'WH00-H00'. "You also get free ID theft services," the girl adds, breaking him from his reverie. But this guy's already sold. All he can say in response is, "Nice." Then we cut to a plain green field and a voiceover which says: "WaMu free checking: we don't nickel and dime you." The words on the screen read 'Whoo hoo!TM' (Really? TM?) and some other voice-over says "Whoo-hoo" in a sort of half-hearted way. It's lack-lustre. Like he's found a free paper clip. I'll go over why that's one of the stupidest commercials I've ever seen in a second - and yes I did see it, I'm not just telling you a story about a bald man opening a WaMu account. It's a real commercial, I swear to God.

Yeah, so, I'm watching a lot of American TV online these days and so that means I'm being exposed to a lot of American ads. And they're completely different to European advertisements, catering as they do to a completely different set of expectations. Over here adverts are all sizzle, no sausage - they're not selling you sausages, they're selling a lifestyle. They want you to want to be the kind of person that buys this brand of sausage. All the American adverts I've seen, on the other hand, set their expectations a lot lower. They just want you to buy the sausage and if they can get to the end of the advert without convincing you it's poisonous their work here is done. American advertisers seem to think that the best way to sell whatever it is they're selling is to just show you other people using the product and finding it satisfactory.

Perfect example, some guys in uniforms go on the streets, in some sort of lorry, taking a cereal on tour like it's a rock band. They accost passers-by and urge them to try new 'Honey Bunches of Oats'. The people in the advert try it and seem to like it - Fin. These aren't even real people doing this taste test, they're actors. You can tell from the way they behave and from the quality of the film - these are people pretending to be members of the public trying a cereal. The message we get is: "Look at these people pretending to like this product. You might actually like it. Still, regardless of how it really tastes, none of them are dead." They have demonstrated, at least, that Honey Bunches of Oats are not in fact poison. Obviously when this idea was first storyboarded and pitched on the space station orbiting Earth in which all adverts are made they had the idea of actually taking the cereal on tour and filming real people eating it. Why they didn't just go with that idea, why they instead chose to fake it, is lost on me. Perhaps they were looking for a more genuine response than Americans' genuine response. Perhaps some people didn't like the oat bunches, honeyed as they were, and they thought editing out those negative comments would be dishonest - and so instead decided to stage the whole thing. It makes me think that maybe they couldn't find anyone who liked it. But this much we know: it won't kill you to try the freaking cereal. Try it, why not? Like I said, lower expectations.

The WaMu advert has taken this a step further, although WaMu is not the only offender, just the worst - this advert has the highest bullshit:product ratio. It's always the same formula - customer walks up to guy selling product, buys product and then something awesome but jarringly unrelated happens to make you think that, even though everything about this scenario is a fiction, even though the guy is an actor just pretending to have a good time, maybe this could happen to you if you booked a flight with American Express or bought a Double Whopper or donated blood.

The difference with WaMu is how low the bar is set. So very low. Our bald man is sent into a fevered dream state of rock music and open-top cars and over what? A free checking account? With free ATM withdrawals?

Now, I'm English. Very English. I am right now drinking tea with three sugars, wearing a tweed jacket and a monocle. And one of those is actually true. Right, so over here we call checking accounts current accounts (and we drive on the left-hand side of the road!) but the principle is pretty much the same. Except that I have never heard of a current account where they charge you for the privilege of borrowing all your money. What else? Free ATM withdrawals? You mean, they don't charge for taking your own money out of a cash machine? That's what gets the bald guy creaming his pants? Here would be the radio version of that advert:

"It's that exhilarating feeling you get when all your hair grows back and you're driving down a highway in the sun in a sports car listening to 'I Wanna Rock'. WaMu: We don't sell you your own money back to you for a small price."

Shit, that's a boast? The alternative is "I would like twenty dollars of my own money back please." "Okay, that'll be a dollar fifty." I know you guys don't have free healthcare over there but is this the standard? Selling people their own money to them? That's just insane! Why don't I just wander the streets of Wakefield selling people five pound notes for ten quid each? That's 200% profit! This is blasphemy, this is madness!

This is... WaMu.

It gets better, free cheques for life. That means they don't charge you for spending your money either! How generous! Wahoo! Fuck me, if they penalise you for using a cash machine and writing cheques, what's the point in putting all your money in a bank anyway? You might as well just keep it at home in a jar. At least that way you can reach into the jar without being charged for it. So yeah, not doing these things ain't exactly a big deal. Oh, and let's not forget our good friend 'Free ID theft services'. Which means in the unlikely event of someone stealing your identity and committing fraud in your name, your bank won't charge you money! Aren't they amazing? I can feel my hair growing back already!

Advert number two in the WaMu circus of horror: woman sits down next to friend in a coffee house which is in terms of decor half-way between a Starbuck's and a primary school classroom. She asks her friend what he's doing on his computer. And he isn't reading Penny Arcade, he's "signing up for WaMu free checking online. It takes less than seven minutes. Pretty fast, huh?" "Yeah," she replies, wistfully, "really fast."

No, that's not really fast. There's a lot you can do in seven minutes. You can save a life in seven minutes, you can bump into the love of your life and get to first base within seven minutes. Hell, you can read through about 10 comics in my archives in seven minutes. If I'm in a coffee house I'm only going to be there for half an hour tops, I don't want to spend a whole seven of those thirty precious minutes signing up for a bank account, not with people looking over my shoulder. Considering how long tedious bureaucracy usually takes to wade through, I suppose seven minutes to set up an account is pretty fast. But it's not really fast. It's not breaking the sound barrier across salt flats in a pink jet-propelled car fast. Because that's the fantasy coffee lady indulges in. For some reason she's wearing a pink fluffy jump suit while this is going on, too - I suppose that is the female equivalent of reversing male pattern baldness, huh? Wearing a lot of pink shit? We come back to the real world and the dream of a seven minute account sign-up has been so visceral that she has crushed her pastry using it as a steering wheel. The only good way for the advert to end at this point is for a glob of foam to escape from her mouth and it turns out she's having some kind of seizure. Alas, this is not the case.

WaMu, what you're offering is mediocre at best, and the visual illustrations you are using to emphasise these 'perks' of not wasting our time and not cheating us only emphasise their mediocrity. I don't know if you're being ironic at this point or if you're just trying to add so many bells and whistles that all people remember is the bald man's hair growing back and they don't remember any of that other stuff (i.e. your shitty offer). All I know is that if the most exciting thing you can imagine is a checking account sans unnecessary charges you need to seriously rethink your life. Go sky-diving, eat a peach, get laid - whatever it takes.

There's a third advert which is based around the first one, which opens with a guy walking up to the till saying: "So you're the guys with all the free stuff." No! No they're not! Not screwing people over is not free stuff. Now, if the account really did cure baldness at no extra cost that would be something special, but not being charged for no good reason is not. Special, I mean. Not special. (By the way, I'm not going to describe this guy's fantasy because it is too stupid for words. Okay, he tucks himself into a tight ball, rolls down a bowling alley, gets a strike with himself and then does a funky little dance. Happy now?)

Again, we get the tag line: "We don't nickel and dime you." Well, get this shitheads - you're not supposed to nickel and dime people! Stop trying to take credit for something you're not even supposed to do in the first place! In the words of Chris Rock: what do you want, a cookie?

I thought about asking this girl out and I was tempted to go with the Honey Bunches of Oats approach and tell her "If you're willing to lower your standards, I'm willing to buy you dinner." Simple, no-nonsense. But now I'm thinking maybe I should go with the WaMu approach, keep it simpler: "If you date me I won't try to rape you." Sounds like a winner to me!

Guys with all the free stuff my ass. I'm actually making a comic strip for free twice a week and I can't give this thing away. These twats are making mercy a selling point and it actually seems to be working! No APR, no interest rates, no overdraft details, we know nothing about this account. It must really suck if their biggest selling point is a seven minute sign-up.

Okay, I'm going to make a TV ad for Life on the Fourth Floor. A guy walks up to me and says "You're the guy that makes the free comic?" And I say, "That's right. The Life on the Fourth Floor free comic is a digital image you can see with your eyes, you can respire whilst reading it with free oxygen and at no extra charge I won't come round to your house and kick you in the testicles." "Wow," the guy mutters to himself before drifting into a fantasy world where he rides around on a kick-ass bike, grows two inches, does a flip off a giant ramp made out of pizza, sails over a swimming pool filled with ice-cold beer and lands on the other side between Angelina Jolie's breasts. Then my snarky Gordon-Ramsay-sounding voice comes on over the footage and says: "Life on the Fourth Floor: we don't kick you in the balls. Wahoo!"

Unauthorized use of any Life on the Fourth Floor materials including characters, images and texts is strictly prohibited.

Life on the Fourth Floor is hosted on Comic Genesis, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics. They specialise in annoying advertisements.