AT&T or How to look like a moron

Gather round children, the campfire is warm and cozy and there shouldn’t be any crazy axe murderers around this time of year. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a huge operator created out of the merger between two slightly less huge operators. They were called Orange and Blue. Well, they weren’t actually called that but they used those “secret cover names” internally to ensure that nobody understod what was going on when preparing the merger. The fact that you had to be dead to not understand it never dawned on the geniuses that came up with it. But never mind that. They merged and created a new operator which was first called Orange and then suddenly changed it’s name to Blue. It was all very tricky. They were also a rather closed system but when another operator in their market declared that their network was open to any device Blue made a decision. They declared that they were also open but that they couldn’t guarantee the performance of devices not sold through the Blue stores.

And everybody laughed and laughed. Because some people actually knew that some of those devices that Blue had sold were so extraordinarily crappy that they couldn’t be used with most DTMF controlled voice application services.

 The moral of this story is simple: don’t sell crap. And don’t buy Motorola phones. And don’t trust operators. And a lot of other stuff.