Reading billboards on the highway

When returning home from Thanksgiving yesterday, stuck in traffic (we and the 4 799 996 other Californians on the road), there was plenty of time to actually read the huge billboards along the highway (going 25 miles per hour...).

Along the highways where we were traveling, the majority of the billboards are about casinos. Happy faces to suggest you actually will leave a casino with more money than you got there with...

Cingular, one of the major cell phone operators, is also a big billboard advertiser. They have a campaign that I really think is strange, at least if you're from Sweden... Their campaign right now, as can be seen in newspapers, TV commercial, print etc is "fewest dropped calls".

I was sitting there in the car, slowly going back home, thinking that it's amazing that you can build a campaign based on being "the least bad"... If you're signed up with Cingular, your calls will be dropped, but at least this will happen fewer times than with another provider...

It's like saying, "buy our tomatoes, they are a bit rotten, but at least they're not as rotten as the other sellers'"...

Dropped cell phone calls are so common here that you can actually get new customers by claiming to drop less calls. Maybe my quality standard when it comes to cell phone services are a bit high, coming from Sweden, which is actually one of the most advanced cell phone nations. I didn't realize until we moved here 7 years ago and hardly anyone knew what a text message was or only one provider offered a GSM net. Or when we signed up to have fax services and no one really knew how to actually receive a the fax.

I know my brother has two way video cell phone calls with my nephew, using his 3G phone when he's far from home working.

At least I have Cingular.

I won't have as many dropped calls.