Bertha has been following me around from website to website, flanked by used Mercedes sedans, for a few days. It's sort of embarrassing to have a woman with giant breasts on your laptop when you're in public, but because of a quirk in my job and how Cars.com displays ads, I can't seem to escape her.
It all started this weekend when someone sent me a tip staying that there was a Cars.com advertisement that, instead of showing a 2001 Mercedes E55 AMG, showed this very well endowed woman whom appears to be an adult film actress. The car was listed at Chuck Benton Automobiles in Portland, Oregon so I decided to give them a call so I could have a great "gotcha" moment.
Specifically, I assumed someone was looking at porn at their boring dealership job and uploaded the photo accidentally.
The man who picked up the phone sounded older and I couldn't quite tell if he was Chuck himself, or just some Gil Gunderson-esque salesman. I explained what happened and he seemed to know exactly what I was talking about.
"We were hacked," he explained without really explaining what he meant. "Thanks for telling me... I got rid of that computer and got a new one but... there are viruses I guess."
He continued to try to provide details as to why this was happening and I'm not sure I believed him, but either he was so confused by technology as to make pointing it out kind of cruel or so clever as to convince me not to write about it. Either way, I let it go for the moment.
And then I realized that, thanks to Cars.com having ad deals with basically every website on the Internet, it assumed I wanted a 2001 Mercedes E55 AMG and it was going to show me the woman with the pendulous, probably fake breasts everywhere I went because it was too dumb to know that wasn't a Mercedes.
Variety:
The Detroit News:
Cake Wrecks:
Even Cake Wrecks!
There is nowhere on the Internet safe for me, so I've got to write about it in the hopes that maybe someone at Cars.com will see it and take Bertha away. To the dealership's credit, they've fixed the problem on their end, but Cars.com hasn't yet.
Maybe they don't want to. Maybe this is a clever pitch: Buy this Mercedes and maybe you, too, can meet a porn star with unlikely anatomy and she'll pose for you on some sort of, uh, floor? Maybe? I don't really get what's going on in this photo and I've seen it, a lot.
So, Bertha, this is probably goodbye. It's been fun having to explain it to anyone who looked over my shoulder and raised an eyebrow that I wasn't looking at pr0n just fake-shopping for a fine German automobile.
UPDATE: Our nightmare is over, Cars.com has pulled the ad.