Washington, DC – The “Air phone look” is a person’s left or right arm crooked with the hand touching the ear and lips simultaneously with the thumb and little finger extended, 3 other fingers folded under the palm.
Everyone’s doing it whether it’s on TV or in the movies; on buses or trains; even through plate glass windows — and always with the mouthed “call me” attached. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Sprint are foaming at the mouth over this blatant quasi phone usage without paying for it.
They are gearing up their lobbyists now on K-Street in DC to go to battle for the rights to their exclusivity of this blatant trespass without payment by everyone on the street.
Caught in a spur-of-the-moment sidewalk conversation, one pr agent said, “You know that it had to be addressed. All these people walking around and seeing friends who they haven’t talked to in 10-15 minutes – they just put up their hand and send the “call-me” message, and bang, their phone rings. Unbelievable. And our clients lose out on that revenue. It has to change and quickly.”
Another lobbyist made a pitch to a Congressional telecom sub-committee that is charged with writing possible legislation. “I know that this seems strange at the beginning, but the more you think about it, someone is using this shorthand communication language to say “call me” to someone else. It is so almost illegal, that we need to word it in a way that people will calmly accept that they need to pay for the act itself.”
The hard-line attack is said to be that everyone with a phone in the US will be charged a minimal 1-cent a day, 30 cents a month Air Phone fee. Since almost everyone has a phone of one sort or another, that’s almost all of the 300 million US citizens currently living here times 30 cents…$90 million large to be collected for the privilege of use.
As the lobbyist said, “that’s not bad when you consider the sad state of phone companies, trying to make a buck under governmental regulations. They are strapped almost head to foot by all the citizen boards around that want something for nothing. It’s not fair to the companies that people can just decide to do this Air Phone act and get away with it.”
Not to mention the terrorist coverage that they are doing for the intelligence thing. The phone pr man said that “our people have been tagged by the White House operatives who want to build an exclusive Air Phone Network. This APN is to be used by CIA agents, who need to contact the FBI and other intelligence agencies with privileged information. They don’t want terrorists to hear the conversation, so the Air Phone works perfectly for their clandestine purposes.” Then he leaned closer and said, “Cheney even wants in on this Network. He has needs for lots of these types of calls.”
Stay tuned for more on this under-the-radar legislation battle. You haven’t begun to hear the last of this.