Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, which he co-directed with animator Duke Johnson, hit Blu-ray this past week, where I’m hoping people will finally discover it. My favorite movie of 2015 opened in 573 theaters at its widest, and I don’t remember seeing a single ad for it. It won awards, it came from an acclaimed writer/director, and still it was nearly impossible for people outside of the major markets to find. The month it was released, Dirty Grandpa opened in 2,912 theaters. A few weeks later, Fifty Shades of Black, which I think Marlon Wayans wrote on a napkin during his limo ride to the set, opened in 2,075. Are lifelike stop-motion puppets really that tough a sell? Perhaps.

Anomalisa‘s protagonist is a middle-aged man named Michael Stone. Stone has arrived in Cincinnati (the pushy cab driver urges him to visit the zoo and try the chili) to give a talk on customer service. Stone, we learn, has written an inspirational book on customer service, entitled How Can I Help You Help Them?

Stone has made his career giving boilerplate business advice like “Always remember, the customer is an individual. Just like you. Each person you speak to has had a day. Some of their days have been good, some bad, but they’ve all had one. Each person you speak to has had a childhood. Each has a body. Each body has aches…”

The speech Stone keeps trying to practice in his room begins “It is my privilege today to talk to you about customer service, what it is and why it’s an essential component of any successful business enterprise. The front line of every customer department is the group of folks who interact directly with the public. The telephone representative at corporate headquarters, the retail associate on the floor of the regional store, the guys or gal…”

The running joke is that, despite the hilariously vague nature of all his businessy advice and catchy aphorisms, Stone repeatedly meets fans who tell him his book “raised productivity by 90 percent.” The other irony of his position is that the guy who advocates treating everyone as an individual has become unable to differentiate people. They’ve all start blending into one.

Now, a curious thing happened to me after I saw Anomalisa. I started seeing Michael Stones everywhere. It turns out, the internet is full of guys making (or trying to make) careers out of dispensing advice even more vague and patronizing than “the customer is an individual.” I think it was my podcast partner Bret who first turned me onto him, and I don’t know how he became aware, but one such real-life Michael Stone is Tod Maffin, a Canadian social media guru or some such, who tweets articles like “CHECK IT OUT: The evolution of hashtags. Are you incorporating them incorrectly?”

That article was written by one of Maffin’s colleagues, and that’s the other thing I found about real-life Micheael Stoneses: There seems to be an infinite number of them. Another article Maffin recently tweeted was written by Dan Gingiss. Here’s a sample Dan Gingiss tweet:

One article Gingiss wrote, tweeted by Tod Maffin, was entitled “How Twitter’s Recent Changes Affect Customer Service.” Here’s a sample of that: