Tag: terrible

Best and Worst Commercials


Being stuck inside for the better part of the past 2 years due to COVID concerns, I’ve seen a lot of great commercials on the TV and on social media and I’ve seen my fair share of terrible ones.

Here is a brief list of some good ones and some terrible ones. It’s in no specific order, and I’ll try to explain why I like or detest them. If you have any to add, please do!

Like: Any commercial for Tide Cold. These commercials with Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ice-T, and a combination of laundry / cold / ice related players like Vanilla Ice, Mark Messier and Falcons QB Matty Ice, are absolutely hilarious! The most recent one with Gordon Ramsey which ends with Stone Cold yelling, “That guy needs to chill out!!” is so good! I get quiet for these commercials.

Like: Any Skip the Dishes commercial with Jon Hamm. Watching him promote the brand (which I use and love) while pretending to be a Canadian makes for very funny commercials.

Like: Uber Eats commercial with Elton John and Lil Nas X is hilarious! It took me a few times of watching it to catch all the little funny bits.

Dislike: KFC “Chicken Rich” commercials. The jingle doesn’t match the commercial, it’s terrible and it doesn’t make me want to eat KFC at all… It doesn’t make sense that fried chicken and chicken rich are a good combination, which is why it’s not. I had to pause it after grabbing the link.

Dislike: Intuit TurboTax Free “Dance Workout” commercial. It’s terrible. You know they say any publicity is good publicity? It’s not true. This commercial, which has a fitness instructor in short shorts saying “free” over and over again while leading a class doesn’t make you think of a tax product, but makes you wonder why Intuit would make another terrible commercial. I had to ask friends, and they all wondered why the commercial led you to believe that someone was going to come free from the instructors shorts, and nothing else. It’s super-cringy. Shame.

Dislike: The BMO commercial about the couple who are out for dinner and the menu is in German and the female comments that she stopped taking the German lessons because the free trial ended. The BMO guy who tells her that she’s paying now is fantastic! I think he’s great and I really enjoy him in the commercials. He’s really awesome as their spokesperson! But what gets me, is that when she finds out she’s still paying she says something in German, which sounds like she’s saying “fuck me!” I had to watch that commercial quite a few times before I realized it wasn’t what she was saying, but regardless… It’s in poor taste. The rest of the commercial is great, and I see they’ve added subtitles now, but still… UGH.

Like: There is a commercial that I’ve seen recently about a family who have a massive hole in their kitchen. I’m not yet sure what the commercial is about, but I like that as they’re staring in the hole, the female says something like, “my cat is in there” and then you hear “meow”, and a second later the male says something like, “and it has my keys”… I just find that last little commentary to be very clever and quite hilarious! I think it’s for one of those non-dairy coffee creamers…

Like: One last one while I remember is a commercial for I believe, Chevy Silverado, and it involves a cat named Walter. This cat loves the winter, and seeing the cat outside partaking in all winter activities is hilarious, especially the scene where a guy is buried in snow, and the cat starts to dig him out. The guys looks at the cat and says, that’s amazing, and the guy who owns the car and the cat says, yeah… that’s the 2022 Chevy Silverado, and he proceeds to discuss the car. Then the guy says, no, the cat! The cat owner says something like, what? you’ve never seen a cat before… It’s clever, it’s funny and it’s cute. Well done!

What’s on your list?

Overheard at Tim Horton’s – The WORST THING EVER!!!


I overhear this conversation at Tim Horton’s recently between a couple of millennials, which caught my attention because it started with one turning to the other and declaring, “OMG! Do you know what is the WORST!”

So I had to listen.

Now you get the details of the “worst”… You might want to sit down for this!

“OMG you know what is the WORST!”

“What?”

“When you order a Coke and they bring you a Pepsi…”

“GASP

“…Without telling you.”

“I know, eh?”

“I mean, it’s so NOT okay for that to happen. They’re two completely different products and you should be warned.”

“Totally… Like when you order coffee with sugar but they forget to put in the sugar…”

“No… Not like that at all.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

Now, I had always imagined the “worst” being something far more catastrophic, like losing a child, or a spouse, or war, famine, natural disasters, but hey… Getting a Pepsi when you order a coke could be pretty bad… Like not being able to download that song for free right away, or not having WiFi available…

Order-in Nightmares: The Thai Grill (formerly Friendly Thai) on Eglinton Avenue


I enjoy posting food posts when I find a place that has great food, or great owners and are really deserving of more traffic but every now and then I need to post about places we have visited – or ordered from – which draws my ire and I feel I must address to prevent others from falling prey to the same mistakes we did and to allow the owners an opportunity to respond or at the very least clean things up.

Here is what happened to us Saturday night.  Please feel free to share your horror stories as well.

At 7pm we decided to order dinner online through JustEat, from a local Thai restaurant called the Thai Grill (formerly the Friendly Thai) a 5-10 minute walk from our house.  We had spent all of Friday night awake with a sick 2-year-old and she spend all of Saturday laying across one of us crying that her tummy hurt, throwing up periodically and not eating or drinking.  The thought her was that it should take us an hour to get the three of them into bed and the food was scheduled to arrive by 7:50.  Perfect.

We got the kids to bed, settled back in downstairs and noticed it was now 8:15 and there was no food.  My wife called the restaurant and was advised it was “going out in 5 minutes”.  We explained to the location that we were very close and that it shouldn’t be a long trip – they could just walk it over as other local places do.

By 8:30 we were back on the phone and this time the food had just left and we were promised that “something extra” had been included in our order as an offer of apology for the fact it took an hour and a half and no food.

At 9pm I called the restaurant and I explained to them it was getting late to eat and wondered where the food was – by this time I was sitting near the front door so they would not ring the bell and wake the kids (oh, the opportunity for irony there).  She said they were very busy and the driver had just left.  She told me we were further than 5 minutes away – like 10 minutes – so it would take 10 minutes before the food arrived.

At 9:15 I called – 15 minutes had passed – no food.  The restaurant sounded puzzled that no food had arrived yet.

By 9:30 I kept calling but this time no one answered and the voice mail box… You guessed it.  Full.

I wanted to tell them to keep their food but was worried that since we paid via credit card on Just Eat that it would be a hassle getting the money back – who would believe that no food came?

When I went online while waiting I saw a LOT of comments about the delivery being horrid but the food being good.  More on this later.

So around 9:45 the food showed up and guess what.  It was tepid in temperature and food was missing.  Of the 5 dishes we ordered – 2 soups, 2 spring rolls, pad Thai and basil chicken, the chicken was not there, nor were the spring rolls.  The delivery guy who leapt out of the car and ran across our neighbours lawn with our food while the driver did a u turn for their next delivery called the restaurant and promised to bring us the Basil Chicken in 20 minutes.  “Too late”, I said.  “10 minutes” he replied.  “I’ll bring you back the basil chicken, the spring rolls and the extra dish for the inconvenience in 10 minutes”,

Off he sped to apologize to the next delivery I suspect.

I waited up until 11pm for those dishes.  finally put up a note asking them not to ring the bell and I went to bed.  The next morning, I looked outside, but there was no food there.

So after an almost 3 hour wait for the food, we were completely disappointed.  It arrived lukewarm, and half of our order was missing.  It took 3 phone calls to track the order down, and the promised extra dishes for our inconvenience were conveniently absent.

The things that alarmed me the most was the actual food.  The soups were great, with my seafood soup leaving me wanting more – but these soups are made during the day and left to cook.  The quality of the rest of the food that had to have been prepared upon order was shocking.  The chicken spring rolls were soggy and oily and seemed to be missing the vital ingredient of chicken.  The Pad Thai tasted like it was made in a hurry with ketchup, not tamarind, and there were no peanuts, sprouts or lemon wedges as advertised on their menu and website.  Frankly, the only good thing to be said about this food was that the portions were large.  I felt like they forgot about the order – they got their money from Just Eat at 7pm, and threw together a joke of a meal for their “delivery” orders.

If these guys cannot get their act together to provide delivery then they should NOT be offering it.  We let Just Eat know this and we commented online and now you know.

I would try them again in their location but the games that came with the order – promises, not answering the phone, not doing whatever it took to satisfy us – not following through with food, means we will never order from this restaurant again.  As a matter of fact, I’m actually going to suggest you go somewhere else as well.  Somewhere that values your money.

The last time we had service this bad was the day ofter Passover about 25 years ago when Pizza Pizza brought our pizza 6 hours after we had ordered – they were busy too – and it was burnt.  They still wanted us to pay but instead he just gave us the food and we tipped the poor guy.

Talk about your experiences:

Update: Within a day of this being posted, I received a very kind note from www.just-eat.ca to see if they could assist in making things right, but the cool thing is that the day before my wife contact Just Eat and they made it right without any fuss.  They credited us back the items we never received and they gave us a $5.00 voucher towards any further order through their site which we will of course use since we have no issues with them – it’s not their fault – but they were super-professional and quick to put this issue behind us and for that they receive 2 thumbs up… WAY up.

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