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.
Copyright 2005 Breakthrough Publishing Ltd.
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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]