Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

Weird, but true.

Let me explain.  cymrullewes and I have Nextel cell phones( ... )

So, to cut a long story short, we've been thinking about switching carriers.  Around here, we're advised, the best coverage by a long shot comes from Verizon, so we've been liooking at Verizon( ... )

So, here's where my brain took off running.

Picture, if you will, a scene of the interior of a cell phone store.  A customer is standing at the counter talking to a sales rep, going over potential calling plans.  In the background, we see a huddle of two or three typical late-teen suburban mall-bunnies.  The sales rep's tone is hyper-frenetic, the customer's harried and frustrated.

• Customer:  "Twenty thousand minutes?!?"
• Sales rep:  "Yes, it's a really popular plan!  It works out to only three cents a minute."
• Customer:  "But that's six hundred dollars a month for airtime!  Don't you have anything less?"
• Sales rep:  "You might be surprised how much airtime you'll use.  Many of our customers feel it's a really great value."

[Camera makes a high-speed zoom-pan onto the mallbunnies, who can now be seen to have two phones each, one held to each ear, and are talking on both at once in an unintelliglble high-speed gabble.  Camera holds for several seconds, then zoom-pans back to customer and sales rep.]

• Sales rep:  "Really, try it, you'll love it.  This is our most popular plan.  The only customers we have who aren't on this plan use our premium plans, which offer even more airtime.  Nobody buys smaller plans."
• Customer:  "But I wouldn't use that much airtime in five years!  Don't you have any cheaper plans with less airtime?"
• Sales rep:  "Well, no ...."  [looks puzzled]
• Customer:  "Well how can anybody buy smaller plans if you don't HAVE one?  Why can't I buy just the airtime I want?"
• Sales rep:  [blank, uncomprehending look]

[Horizontal wipe to black, to a sound-effect of tearing paper.  Slow fade-in to still of a phone and $PHONE_COMPANY logo, with calm, measured voice-over:]

"$PHONE_COMPANY.  Pay for the airtime you used, not the airtime you didn't.  An idea whose time has come."

Personally, while you probably wouldn't make as much per customer selling people just the airtime they actually used, I'll bet you'd pull in a big enough customer share that you'd be making money hand over fist.

( Footnotes )