From Gregg Drinnan’s Taking Note blog this morning:
The Radio Wars going on between the two cities has gotten comical. After Drive morning show host Steve Russell phone Medicine Hat area golf courses looking for tee-times for the Tigers on Wednesday morning a Hat radio station personality phoned the Drive this morning saying that he was Ice forward Dustin Sylvester and that he had missed the bus to Medicine Hat. The Drive went on the air asking if someone could give Sylvester a ride to Medicine Hat. At 8 a.m., Ice players received text messages on their cell phones asking if Sylvester was really not with the team. Sylvester was obviously with the team and went on to score a goal and an assist, garnering first star honours.
It’ll be fun when we can start doing that with Trail Blazer playoff opponents again.
Listening to the radio while cruising around this evening, I heard a fascinating ad from my old employer Qwest. Rather than trying to get me to buy a bundle (Custom Choice!), they were trying to get me to sign up for telephone assistance. A decade ago I would have been ridiculed had the words “telephone assistance” ever crossed my lips. We were all about selling packages and cell phones. I can remember one of my co-workers shipping four cell phones to a lady in a nursing home with the promise of free long distance. Nice, huh?
The worm has definitely turned in telecom. The days of the second and third home line are long gone. Families with teenagers no longer get a second line. Home Internet users have migrated away from dial-up modems in favor of cable or DSL. And the younger generation is forgoing hard lines altogether in favor of cellies. So that leaves the low-income folks who can’t afford cell phones and senior citizens as their prime market for home phone service. Gone are the days of the $100/month target customer. Now they consider themselves lucky to retain a $20/month POTS line. Fascinating.
