Cingular Customers Can "Escape-A-Date"

Story Author: Mike Maroulis, mmarouli@iun.edu
Publish Date: Not Available
Source Publication: TechBuzz Report

As many college students know, dating can be an adventure. It may be a second or third date with someone you know, or it can be a blind date, set up by your “not so smart” friends. If you are like most people thrown into that situation you are begging for a way out, well beg no longer.

Cingular Wireless has come out with an answer for dating woes. “Escape-A-Date” is a new feature bundled with Cingular’s Voice Connect service.

The service is extremely easy to use. I called Cingular to add the services to my phone for a trial. You simply dial *8 and send to access the Voice Connect service. After that you can tell it a number to call, a name of a stored number, lottery, weather, sports, movies or Escape-A-Date.

I set up Escape-A-Date to call me three times. Each time it gave me different prompts that I would say if I was in the intended situation. These prompts range from your roommate “locking the keys in the apartment” to friends seeing Elvis in food.

A service like this, if it picks up the way the marketing people at Cingular would like, may change the face of dating for this generation and generations to come.

A service like this and others like it have to make you wonder if technology is really starting to run people’s lives. A person who subscribes and uses this feature may think that it is great to not have to waste an entire evening on a date that you really do not want to be on, but is it fair to the person, for lack of a better word, that is being dumped on the date.

All dating rituals aside, this is a service that is currently being offered in the Chicago area to Cingular customers, and upon completion of the Cingular/AT&T Wireless merger, may be available to AT&T Wireless customers by the end of the year.

Cingular’s Voice Connect service is $4.99 per month per line, you may try it free for 30 days and as always normal airtime charges apply.

In other news from Cingular, consumer emergency tips have been released in the event of severe weather or catastrophic events such as a tornado or earthquake.

All cellular phone companies suggest the following:

  • Program in all emergency contact numbers (SIM card programming is the best in case your phone is damaged and you have to use another one).
  • If you are without power, you can use wireless internet features (available even without a wireless internet package in many cases) to view weather information and other emergency information.
  • Learn how to use text messaging, in many cases when phone signal is too low to make a call, you can still send and receive text messages.
  • In the event of an evacuation, if possible forward your home phone to your cell phone, that way you will not miss any calls.

Rest assured that if severe weather strikes, many cell companies have contingency plans in place to make sure you can still “reach out and touch someone”

Cingular, and Verizon wireless have COWs (Cellular on Wheels) that can be driven into a hard hit area and provide cellular service to its own subscribers and GSM roaming subscribers.
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