Here we have a spot featuring some guy allegedly in a foreign country using his smartphone to translate for him. He speaks into the phone, touches something, and it says what he said in the language of the purported faraway land. So now, with this new “network of possibilities”, we can communicate with everyone! Yay! (But isn’t that actually an app that would run on the phone no matter what network you had? Oh, never mind…)
But there are some problems with this stuff, you know. What if some irritating foreigner wants something from you, and you want to get rid of him? With this new “miracle” feature, you can no longer escape by feigning a lack of comprehension! That’s going to make it very difficult to get rid of annoying tourists! I guess you could always feign deafness, or simple stupidity, or perhaps display the general disinterest common to our young people, and after a while, they’d probably go away and bother someone else. But you never know! And now, thanks to AT&T, we can no longer avoid meeting other people! Well, unless you just stay home and watch TV or play video games, which is what most of us are doing all the time anyway, so maybe it’s not such a big deal after all.
But there’s still one issue I’m curious about: If this smartphone will translate stuff for us, does that mean that French people will have to actually answer our questions, or will they simply proceed to complain about the computer voice on the phone, and attempt to chide it and correct its grammar and pronunciation? Or since the phone has no feelings, will it ruin the fun of being rude for them? Maybe they’ll just give us the information we want, and visiting France will lose that wonderful affectation of snobby superiority we’ve all come to love and expect! And then we’ll all lose interest in France, and we’ll no longer be going there.
Or is this what the French are planning all along with this newfound delightful friendliness and approachability? So perhaps they’re just trying to be rude in a new, passive-aggressive way! So that’s how they’re hoping to get rid of us! Those jerks! I say we go there en masse (Oh, did I write that correctly, France?) and all mangle their language simultaneously in a gauche parade of “ugly Americana”! Take that, France! (I’m kidding: I love France. But they are rude to tourists.)
Here’s the ad:
