Tradenfreude

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Scottrade TV Commercial Featuring Chad Ridgeway -- Squash

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About six or seven years ago the word “schadenfreude” started showing up in a surprising amount of the newspaper and magazine columns I was reading at the time. Apparently whatever website journalists were going to for their “word of the day” must have been featuring it pretty prominently at the time. Either that or there was some ink-stained wretches migration to book clubs featuring the works of Susan Sontag. Whatever the real reason, when I first came across it, and wondered what the hell it meant, I did the smart thing and asked the internet. Sure enough, it knew. “Schadenfreude” is a German word meaning “taking joy is the pain or misfortune of others.” Maybe those journos were right to be flaunting their find. Talk about a great word to have around.

Anyone would be hard pressed to claim they don’t engage in at least a little schadenfreude more often than not. Only the most saintly of us is immune to the almost orgasmic joy of seeing some doof that really deserves it finally get what he’s got coming. Payback (at least for others) is one of the few things that can almost always brighten an otherwise gloomy day. So when you see the financial devastation wrought by the surprisingly effective manoeuvres of financial whiz bangs and their political enablers it’s not hard to understand the almost universal happiness at seeing them take it on the chin even a little bit. Okay, maybe they don’t exactly lose their shirts – just a yacht or a beach-house here or perhaps a Ferrari there – but they gotta be at least a little unhappy about it. And is it really so wrong to enjoy their well-deserved misfortune even a bit? They may claim they work hard but anybody taking three-hour lunches and getting paid to play golf during the workday is begging for a comeuppance of some kind.

Scottrade, a US internet stock trading site has a series of TV ads that allow us to revel in more than a little bit of schadefreude at the expense of one Chad Ridgeway. Created for Scottrade, this dorky sputnik is clearly the most obnoxiously lazy stock broker/financial advisor you could ever find that does anything but his job. He’s out on yachts, dining in restaurants, rocking at parties and whatnot – everything and anything but the work he’s supposed to be doing for you and me. The fun part to all this is that Chad is watching his business melt before his very eyes as the hard-workers over at Scottrade steal away his clients even as he prances around in the afternoon sun. In each spot he seems to learn nothing even as each displays his unhappiness at losing his clients. Change his behaviour? Not on your life.

 The best of the ads is the sports one where Chad wanders through his squash club with an alpha male buddy as he takes a call from his boss. The boss tells him that they are losing clients at an alarming rate. To see Chad’s smarmy attitude slip away in the midst of wasting his working day is eclipsed only by the shot of him getting smacked in the face by the squash ball. Schadenfreude is right. We want to see these sorts of things happen to people who act like this. Fair or not, white-collar folks never seem to work all that hard, even when they do. And when you add in creeps like Bernie Madoff – fleecers of the first order – it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt everything in our hearts we know to be true. There are way too many schmucks out there claiming to do work they most certainly are not.

So if there’s any good to actually come out of the various financial vomit-fests we seem to be enduring these days maybe the best we can hope for is that our BS meters get a little more attuned to the kind of do-nothings folks like Chad so ably represent. Being able to enjoy any suffering he might be forced to endure is just icing on the cake. Still, I do fear that while I’m yucking it up at the misfortune of our financial betters the bell of schadenfreude might just start clanging for me. Schadenfreude always sounds like a heckuva lotta fun but darned if it doesn’t have a habit of cutting both ways.