Word: phoned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Which brings me to this summer, the pinnacle of my existence. The copious quantities of knowledge that I've acquired over the last three years should give me total independence over the problems that have baffled me before. Yet I'm still making phone calls like these to south Texas...
...deal with people, much less perform community service, but anything was better than going home. So I applied to be the Philip Brooks House (PBH) summer receptionist, and thankfully received the job. It was basically a secretary's position and ranged from calming down campers' irate parents on the phone to fighting daily with the 200-year-old fax machine. While I met an endless number of truly amazing people, developed a classy receptionist's voice and learned to pick up a ringing phone in .25 seconds, living alone in a tiny on-campus room left my wounds unhealed...
...this--not everyone is looking for his or her life partner yet. Additionally, if you take a chance once every two months, you might go on four really memorable dates. You might have to give up a couple of Saturdays of drinking and probably more than one last-ditch phone call from friends desperate to see a movie. But it will be worth it, because you will have taken a good risk...
These fast, cheap networks are rewriting what used to be the first commandment of telecommunications: Thou shalt be huge. No phone company now has to invest billions in an expensive network. Instead it can just piggyback on other folks' networks, which have excess capacity to rent. Some upstarts are building networks of their own. Says Joseph Nacchio, CEO of Qwest, a telecom upstart based in Denver: "All the old reasons for scale are gone." Nacchio, who left the No. 3 slot at AT&T to run Qwest, compares the latest round of mergers to "an oligarchy buying a monopoly...
That should be good for consumer service and savings. Even Bell Atlantic's Seidenberg has said, to FORTUNE magazine, that he foresees a world where, rather than pay for phone calls by the minute, "people will in effect just pay a subscription rate to have access to a network." And while all-you-can-talk (or watch, or surf) lines could be a dream for consumers, they will be a nightmare for the mega-Bells, which must add new subscribers faster than they lose revenue to new competitors and pricing pressures. Some firms, like AT&T, hope to find lucre...