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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Emergency calls

One of the things you learn to do at work is look out for each other. You notice someone is having to deal with someone difficult, so you call him on the phone: "Hi, this is Leo. If you want to end that meeting now, pretend this is an important call." Then, when you need it, he'll do the same thing for you. Now, the whole thing has been automated:

Have you ever been in a situation where you wished your cell phone would ring? Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting.

With "The Popularity Dialer", you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that's one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

Here's Leo's bonus tip: If you're on a phone call that's gone on way too long, but you don't want to appear rude, hang up in the middle of one of your sentences. The person on the other end will assume there's been a disconnection that's nobody's fault except the phone company's.

Comments

Steve Towsley
Sun, 08/06/2006 - 7:22pm

I like your tip. My Virgin Mobile cell phone has this feature built in. It's called Rescue Rings, and all you do is set a timer to call yourself at a moment in the future.

Your cell phone rings at the time you specified, so you can pretend to speak to someone (virtual voice provided at the other end so others can overhear some faux dialog) and you can beg leave to go after your performance. Oscar not included.

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