Subject:
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Electronics and harsh environments (was Re: SNOW (was funny ebay auction)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.fun
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Date:
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Wed, 2 Feb 2000 16:47:55 GMT
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Reply-To:
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lpieniazek@novera.(nospam)com
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Viewed:
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906 times
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Frank Filz wrote:
> I'm just waiting for work to give me a pager on a weekend I go caving...
> I'd have to pick the muddiest cave possible and see of the pager even
> survives...
That remindes me of a story, which, since I am on hold at eTrade, I will
bore you with. Herewith follows my tale.
As many of you know, I carry a Nextel cell phone (1). Nextel markets to
a number of segments... what hooked me was the no roaming charges (2)
when in distant cities which is a great feature when you travel a lot.
But they also market extensively to a segment in which groups of people,
often employees of the same firm, need to stay in communication. So they
have a "direct connect" offering in which you can call locally or
remotely in your group with just a few keystrokes and the phone acts
more like a walkie talkie, there's no dial tone and you just start
hearing the person rather than there being ringing. There's no airtime
charge for this, I don't think.
Needless to say this is very popular among construction trades people
who have a need to stay in touch across far flung jobsites. They've now
started marketing a ruggedised version of their phones, all bright
yellow plastic and rubberised membrane buttons, but at the time they
didn't have it yet.
Anyway, I was in a Nextel service center buying a new battery. The
tradesperson in front of me was saying that he could not get his phone
to work in direct connect mode. The tech took it, started opening the
plastic case, and rock dust CASCADED out of the case, then out of the
flip top. This originally dark grey phone was white with dust!
She looked at it, did a few test Direct Connects and said, "you forgot
to press the speakerphone button... you can hear the person at the other
end faintly". She pressed speakerphone and voila, you could hear an
irritated foreman at the other end saying "Jim, what do you want, you
keep directconnecting(3) and you don't actually say anything, don't you
have any rock to cut?? Stop tieing up my phone with your pranks" in a
rather agitated voice. The tech said "sorry, we are just testing" and
the foreman replies "Jim, you've changed!".
Needless to say the phone worked fine despite all the dust. Motorola
technology is sometimes pretty good. (4)
OK, eTrade is back, and my warrant exercise on eMerge Interactive has
been accepted. Gotta LOVE Safeguard (SFE) what a money machine that
stock has been, one spin off after another. Hope you enjoyed this story.
1 - and the stock has been nice to me as well, although I am currently
out except for 1 share.
2 - and local calls are local to where you are, not local to your home
market, which cuts down on long distance charges if you are mostly
calling clients where you are, etc...
3 - note the verbization of the words "direct connect" into
"directconnecting"
4 - the carpet turned a bit lighter where this fellow was standing too.
Hope he wears a mask when he's actually cutting rocks.
--
Larry Pieniazek - larryp@novera.com - http://my.voyager.net/lar
http://www.mercator.com. Mercator, the e-business transformation company
fund Lugnet(tm): http://www.ebates.com/ ref: lar, 1/2 $$ to lugnet.
Note: this is a family forum!
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