Cell Phone Carriers' Secret!

Hehe... Yet another excerpt from David Pogue's NY Times blog, where he describes a half-joking comment he made to a cellular exec at a big cellular-industy conference in Lake Como, Italy:

(P.S. … As longtime Pogue’s Posts readers know, my biggest cellular pet peeve is the endless recording you hear when you reach someone’s voicemail: “To page this person, press 2 now. You may leave a message at the tone. When you finish recording, you may hang up. Or press 5 for more options”—and so on.

At the conference, I asked one cellular executive if that message is deliberately recorded slowly and with as many words as possible, to eat up your airtime and make more ARPU [Average Revenue Per User] for the cell carrier. I was half kidding—but he wasn’t fooling around in his reply: “Yes.”

The secret’s out.)

Aaaaaa-HA!

-e

An Incredible (and hilarious) iPhone story

Check this report out from David Pogue's NY Times blog:

It seems that an enterprising Dallas woman brought $16,000 in cash to her local AT&T store on Friday, with the intention of buying out the store’s entire inventory of iPhones and then selling them on eBay. She breezed up to Mark Rebillet, the man at the head of the line, who’d been waiting there for hours, and offered him $800 to surrender his place in line. He agreed.

Turns out it was an excellent trade. Sure enough, the enterprising entrepreneur, who quite reasonably declined to give her name, was first in the door. That’s the first she heard about AT&T’s rule: one iPhone per customer.

As for Mark Rebillet: he, too, made it in the door before all the iPhones were gone. He spent much of the $800 on an iPhone and loads of accessories, in effect getting it all for free.

How awesome is that??

-e