SA | Our Couch

I’ll admit it. I was kind of skeptical when I saw the TV commercial the first couple of times. To me, it seemed like it focused a little less on the actual service they offer and more on the fact that sometimes grown men don’t really know what they’re doing when it comes to mechanical things.*

However, my Sunday paper included an eye-catching book from Repair.com that breaks down what they do and how they do it.

I'm intrigued.

Someone is offering to help me with this headache? And they’re doing it with well-written and cleanly designed advertisement? This seems weird.

Thank you for your approval of several of my fashion choices.

Look at all those butts.

In a nutshell, they’re saying that if you have an appliance breakdown, you can give them a call, tell them what’s happening and they’ll tell you what is likely causing the problem. Then they’ll be your repair person (although let’s face it, that is not the keister of a lady in that picture up there) liason: they find the repair person (still being gender-neutral!), set up the appointment and tell you how much it will cost. Your only responsibility is to let the repair person (that’s it, I’m going back to “repairman” – my apologies to all female repairers) into your house. And I suppose you’ll have to pay someone at some point.

Maybe all they’re doing here is adding another layer to an already complicated situation, and I’m sure this service isn’t free. But at the very least, they sound like they plan on being nice to you when you call. And I suppose they’re not going to work with repairmen or companies that are known for treating their customers poorly. And they had the good sense to not call themselves, “Repair.biz,” so I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Hats off to the ad agency who created their insert for them too. It feels weird to offer a compliment to someone beside ourselves, but we’re living on the edge here.

Maybe it’s the butt cracks. They’re difficult to resist.

*My eighth grade Industrial Arts teacher would be appalled to know that the VHS rack he taught me to build was my first and last VHS rack. I take partial responsibility for the disappearance of the format. If I had kept building VHS racks, people would have had the room to store them and would have kept buying them. Someone should build me a storage device for my giant pile of shame.

I sort of think they're spelling their name wrong.

The good people at Nielsen are stepping things up. As you know, Nielsen is the company that measures and tracks TV viewership. They can tell you how many people watch which shows and how old those people are. Up until now, these numbers have been based only on viewing via a traditional television set. (They include DVR views, but only if it was watched within three days of the airdate. So if you’re like me and you’re saving up an entire season of Reba’s Malibu Country to watch in one tragedy-filled, Funyun-soaked sitting, your eyeballs will not count towards her total viewers.)

Nielsen announced this week that they will begin counting viewers who watch TV shows on a broadband connection too. They’re even working on ways to tabulate views on mobile phones, iPads and non-iPad tablets that people are usually ashamed to own.

These changes will go into effect this September and they will also include views through your Wii or other game consoles and online services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. Including these homes will add thousands of new viewership opportunities. Just think – if everyone who likes Smash watches it online, this announcement will probably make things only slightly better for them.

“Consumers are accessing content in new ways that fall outside of our traditional definitions and if we don’t expand, we could be missing an emerging trend,” a representative from Nielsen said in what is widely considered to be one of the most obvious statements in recent history. Exceptions include: “It turns out that Ricky Martin is gay,” and “O.J. Simpson has broken the law.”

Services like Netflix have always kept viewership numbers for their original programming, such as House of Cards and the forthcoming fourth season of Arrested Development, but they usually keep those numbers to themselves. “If we keep it a secret, then it’s more special,” said some guy who also probably has an account on AshleyMadison.com.

Even so, Nielsen will now be able to tabulate information about who in the household is watching which shows on broadband and how much of it they are watching. That’s the kind of stuff that people who work in advertising (Hi there!) like to know. As they say, “I’d rather 2 million college sophomores watch my show than 10 million sixty-somethings.” I don’t know if they actually said that. Our HR person once told me, “As they say, she’ll survive.” She was probably referring to the same people, right?