Best. Disclaimer. Ever.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Snoop Dogg Orbit gum commercial, where our hero averts eternal damnation with demonic octogenarians for his dirty language. Orbit gum comes to the rescue and next thing you know, he’s sitting pretty in Heaven, in a “dogg” bowl the size of a above ground pool surrounded by angelic hotties more in Snoop’s age range.
The disclaimer :Dramatization. Orbit Gum will not get you into heaven.
My roommates think they put that there as a joke, but I’m not sure. Some unlucky Orbit Gum chewer comes out of a near death experience of less than Snoop quality and he may go for restituion.

I used to think disclaimers blocked what was the only form of natural selection we had left. We don’t have predators filtering our gene pool, so something needs to be done. If a person needs to be told not to hug a bear cub and drive into a active volcano, don’t they kinda need to die for the benefit of humanity?

The problem is that medical science being what it is, these people don’t die and instead become rich from the resulting litigation. Or at least their lawyers do.

It’s a well traveled road on this blog, but working retail has proven the value of disclaimers. At the Toy store,I often have been the living disclaimer, warning customers every time they need to have anything to make anything else work. “Do you guys have a Mac at home?”, “Do you have glue for this model?”, “You know you need to subscribe to a service to play World of Warcraft?”
I’ve had people get pissed at me for asking, “I’m not an idiot!” Of course not but a lot more people have thanked me for thinking about them and even more have said,”no, do I need that? Thanks!”
This came from times of people wanting to return things that they had opened before realizing they needed something else to make it work. Their defense was,”YOU didn’t tell me I needed that.”
I’m sorry if it’s unreasonable to ask that you actually know what you’re buying, but it’s not a secret. It’s clearly marked on the product what it is and what it needs and if you asked me before you bought it, I would have told you. So I became much more proactive for my own benefit.
I was waiting in line at the Black Cat and the guy behind me remarked to his girlfriend,” Do they really need a sign telling people not to piss in the neighborhood when they leave?”
I interjected, “Trust me, if there’s a sign there’s a reason.”
The same holds true for disclaimers, it’s to try to save people from themselves, with various degrees of success.