This Is Not An iPhone Post

There has been much ado about the iPhone, and for good reason. I tried one in an Apple store yesterday and it was everything I always dreamed an iPhone would be from when I was an iKid. It made me think of how far cell phone technology has gone, with cameras and…cameras. I was a little late on the cell phone craze, mostly because I was in grad school when it started to become common and at that time I couldn’t afford much of anything. My first cell phone was in 2004 at the ripe old age of almost 25. Back then people were constantly lamenting the cell phone age; how it was irreversible, how it was a new medium for blatant rudeness and disregard for others, etc. Those complaints were mostly true, but they were never filed with a proper measure of historical perspective, and most were slippery slope arguments attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill.

It would be easy to go on about the benefits of the cell phone – increased safety due to quick communication with help in various forms, enhanced efficiency decreasing instances of wasted time… But one of the biggest benefits in my opinion has been the elimination and extinction of 1-800-COLLECT commercials. They were at least as annoying as local car and furniture store ads, if not more so, and there would be an irrationally large number of collect call companies competing against each other. 1-800-COLLECT was very popular, but then 1-800-CALLATT issued in an era of phone number memorization insanity. I admit, it is somewhat reasonable to expect someone to remember “CALLATT” when they need to make a collect call. Then other companies went into a frenzy of “10-10” numbers vying for all of your collect call business. There was 10-10-321, 10-10-220, 10-10-811, and others that I can’t remember. They would all be competing for that large market of people who are not near someone’s phone who would allow charging a call. These commercials aired ALL THE TIME, in every commercial break. Not only that, but 1-800-COLLECT saw this very annoying trend, assessed the situation, and instead of coming up with a reasonable spokesman to counter the collect call mania, they went with the most obnoxious person on the planet – Carrot Top. Maybe it was a genius strategy since I still remember the commercials today, but by that time there were so many collect call services that I would have chosen another one just to spite Carrot Top. Maybe whatever service John Stamos worked for, post-Saget.

The situation got so insane Saturday Night Live even noticed it and did a parody of the 10-10 commercials. The joke was coming up with mnemonic devices to help you remember the lengthy string of completely random numbers involved in a collect call. Shortly after, the collect call hysteria died down as more people had access to cell phones and had complete control of who and where they were calling and generally complete knowledge of how they were being charged. Alas, the elimination of collect call commercials will probably be the cell phone advantage that time forgot.