Tuesday, May 6, 2008
If a Tree Falls in the Woods, Do You Still Get Billed?
It's never a good thing when your phone bill arrives in a box.
One of our testers was trying out software on his Blackberry. He has an unlimited data plan, and it occurs to me that this story will only work if I explain a couple of things about active GPS. Our trackers are constantly getting in touch with GPS satellites. They can, in theory, get a new position fix every 1-2 seconds. For most people, this is too much information--so rather than report every single position, we program trackers to report at different intervals depending on the speed and movement of the vehicle. That way, if a vehicle is driving a mile up the highway, you see 3 reports rather than, I dunno, 50.
And to whomever proofreads this, I swear, I'm advertising our service, not giving away trade secrets.
I digress. Since this tester of ours was, well, testing, he had the report frequency cranked all the way up so he could check out the data. So his Blackberry was sending data to our server every 1-2 seconds while he drove around making sure it worked. And even though he had an unlimited data plan, his carrier felt the need to itemize the activity of his phone.
And that's how his phone bill got to be 400 pages long.
That's right, we butcher forests to make sure our products are up to spec! Actually, I'm going to blame the cellphone carrier for this one. Do the math. Here's a 400-page-document (which is a novel to most people or a short story to Stephen King) devoted to a $40 unlimited data plan. In that case, every page addresses about $.10 worth of bill, which I doubt covers the costs of paper and postage (what with the rising costs of toner and gas), to say nothing of all those little data transfers.
So, perhaps, around page 50 or so, maybe the phone company could just put "et al", or ellipses or something.
One of our testers was trying out software on his Blackberry. He has an unlimited data plan, and it occurs to me that this story will only work if I explain a couple of things about active GPS. Our trackers are constantly getting in touch with GPS satellites. They can, in theory, get a new position fix every 1-2 seconds. For most people, this is too much information--so rather than report every single position, we program trackers to report at different intervals depending on the speed and movement of the vehicle. That way, if a vehicle is driving a mile up the highway, you see 3 reports rather than, I dunno, 50.
And to whomever proofreads this, I swear, I'm advertising our service, not giving away trade secrets.
I digress. Since this tester of ours was, well, testing, he had the report frequency cranked all the way up so he could check out the data. So his Blackberry was sending data to our server every 1-2 seconds while he drove around making sure it worked. And even though he had an unlimited data plan, his carrier felt the need to itemize the activity of his phone.
And that's how his phone bill got to be 400 pages long.
That's right, we butcher forests to make sure our products are up to spec! Actually, I'm going to blame the cellphone carrier for this one. Do the math. Here's a 400-page-document (which is a novel to most people or a short story to Stephen King) devoted to a $40 unlimited data plan. In that case, every page addresses about $.10 worth of bill, which I doubt covers the costs of paper and postage (what with the rising costs of toner and gas), to say nothing of all those little data transfers.
So, perhaps, around page 50 or so, maybe the phone company could just put "et al", or ellipses or something.
Labels: humor
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