My Late Billy Mays Post

Yes, I was aware of another "untimely" death that happened within a matter of 72 hours. Billy Mays was sorta like an enigma to me. He appeared during the most unexpected times of the television viewing day and his enthusiasm over the products he was hocking actually made those products good enough to get our attention. Yet it's because of that enthusiasm that I found him to be slightly insufferable and easily mockable. And then came along a prostitute kissing, prostitute beating douchebag who wanted to make his New York-accent believable to audiences who were sucked into the most usless rag on earth. And it's with this that Billy's profession was put into perspective. There was no one like Billy. In some respects, he could be viewed as the originator of the television pitch game when we know some of the legends before him. The Juiceman and Ron Popeil come to mind. But Billy was a real person who made us believe that we had real problems in our lives that could only be solved with whatever he was selling. Whether the bottom line of these pitches were ethical becomes irrelevent with his approach to the sale. And that is that you could see that he believed in the product that he was selling. If you have seen an episode of Pitch Men on A&E, you would have known that he doesn't necessarily invent these products but gives the chance to regular American people to sell their inventions.

Here's to you, Billy. I will make sure I buy three 2-gallon buckets of OxyClean while I wipe my ass with a ShamWow.