Unholy marketing department
By Nick Farrell: Thursday 12 May 2005, 10:28
A CHRISTIAN TELCO in Oklahoma, has been drumming up business by
smearing its rivals on moral affairs.
United American Technologies has been billing itself as "the only
carrier that is taking an active stand against same sex marriages and
hardcore child pornography." According to the Wonkette, here, its
sales and marketing division has been even more explicit to customers
who ring them up with questions.
One of Wonkette's readers asked the outfit if AT&T sponsors child
pornography and was told no, but MCI did.
The sales person made the outrageous suggestion that MCI has "a
paedophile Web site for men who love boys" based in Montreal. Verzon,
said United American Technology, trains its employees to accept the
gay and lesbian lifestyle.
Without a trace of irony, the salesman agrees with the caller that,
"God hates AT&T, MCI, and Verizon".
You can here recordings of the conversations here and here.
Caller Eugine Mirman is clearly having a bit of fun with the very
straight UAT marketing salesperson.
Apparently the company is doing quite well with more than 2000 people
switching a month, which says some people obviously think it is
important to have a right-wing phone company.
A cut of the proceeds helps fund conservative political campaigns, via
a 527 called "Faith Family and Freedom" created by the Republican
floor leader of the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
However, it will be interesting to see how long it all lasts, briefs
for MCI and Verizon should be in a holding pattern as we speak.
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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Neither Lisa nor myself could find
where the .wav files (indicated by 'here' and 'here' above) went to.
If you are reading the text-based mailing list of this Digest, you
may wish to look up the web site for the (British) Inquirer, read
the article and see if you can locate the missing .wav files. It should
make good listening.
Too bad these folks were not around when AT&T _was_ sliding into this
territory a little. Remember a few years ago when the big deal on
chat/sex telephone lines was 'this is a free call; all you pay is
toll charges'. The catch was, it was always _overseas, international_
toll, in some god-forsaken backward island country somewhere, or so
they claimed in the process of re-routing the call. You _had_ to place
the call over AT&T; they used T-1 lines to reroute you and deliver
your call as needed. Of course the chat was 'free', AT&T made its
money from the sheer volume of inbound traffic diverted to it and the
associated tolls. In their ads, AT&T had clever ways of parsing the
number they gave you to call supposedly so you would not discover it
was the country code for Guyana or wherever. In the ads, always with
an S&M overtone, we'd see these 'Mistresses' or gay 'masters' with
the proper boots, leather clothing, whips, etc. And the text would be
something like "Reach Out and Touch a New Friend" and AT&T's helpful
advice, 'this is a free call; no charge for chat; just pay tolls'.
AT&T learned years ago there was a lot of money to be made from
'obscene' long distance calls which went on for an hour or so per
call all night long, commonly known as 'phone sex'. Had the very
conservative (it would appear) United American Technologies and their
right wing allies been around in the late seventies when long distance
phone sex chat was so common, they'd have had a field day making
accusations against AT&T, Sprint, MCI and others. I wonder if any of
those people even remember the reputation 'area code 900' had when
it was in the news so much 20 years ago? Geeze, and _you_ thought
the net was wide-open wild-west territory. PAT]
Lisa Minter (lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com)