Next time my GPS tells me The Office is funny, I won’t question it
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- January
- 3
This is my “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” mea culpa. I’m referring to the recent season’s second episode of The Office, which I ranted and raved against for what I thought was one of the show’s most ridiculous and target-missing gags.
While on a mission to recoup lost customers with gift baskets in order to prove that sales is about people and not machines, Michael Scott ironically drives his rental car into Lake Scranton at the behest of his GPS device. That’s right, the machine said turn right, so he turned right into the lake. It wasn’t funny, I maintained, because it could never happen.
To be precise, actually, I called it “a very stupid scene” on Oct. 5, not “funny or comprehensible.”And in an Oct. 14 tirade I called it one of the season’s “bizarre sights” and “potential cutting-room-floor material”. A few days later, I accused the brilliant and comedically unassailable Steve Carell of “chewing up scenery…like when he drove into the lake”.
Yeah, I didn’t really hold back much. Anyway, I had to come clean because it turns out going where your Tom Tom, Garmin or Magellan decrees, regardless of hazard to life or limb, isn’t all that uncommon after all, as an article at LoHud.com illustrates.
It seems a Sunnyvale, Calif., motorist was driving on Green Lane in Bedford Hills last night, when his GPS said to turn right. Only instead of a lake to his right, there was the Metro-North Railroad line. No one was injured, but his rental car and 200 feet of track took the brunt of the fiery collision that followed.
“He tried to stop the train by waving his arms, which apparently was not totally effective in slowing the train,” railroad spokesman Dan Brucker said.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 12:40 pm by Brian Howard.
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