'Sad ad' suggests kids lack life skills

A new TV advertisement for a bank has had Sina Weibo buzzing. It features a young Chinese student in North America who needs to cook an egg and tomato omelet for a potluck lunch. We see him make several lame attempts at cracking an egg (he mashes two together at one point) before he gives up and sends a WeChat message asking for guidance from his mother, which wakes her up, as it's the middle of the night back in China.

Unlike my mother, who would likely respond to being woken in the wee hours with a string of emojis conveying a thinly veiled threat (angry face, bloodied cleaver, skull), our heroine gets out of bed and heads straight to the kitchen, where her husband films a video of her making the omelet.

The son follows the directions and proudly presents his dish at the lunch - where it finally dawns on him there's a 12-hour time difference with China and that he had troubled his mother with a question Baidu could easily have answered.