“Ya,” Burke replied, punctuating his message with the sack of money emoji.</Quote>
Heh, amateurs. Let me tell you guys a story from my country, from 90's. So in those years cell phones started to become the norm. You know, those Nokia brick types (which had like 1 week of battery in them before requiring charging) but the service was like this. You would call your contact then around 4 or 5 rings will give you plenty of time to close the call, and after that a voice mail message would inform you the contact was not answering and inviting you to leave a message. Problem was that if you went that far, then you'd pay for those seconds when the automated voice mail be initiated just like if your contact would've answered. So far so good. But one CEO of a cell company decided he wanted money. So randomly, he would enable the automated voice mail message to enter just after one ring. Now, individually that was not expensive, around few cents for each subscriber, but on the whole network this would mean for every hour this trick was pulled the company would win one million dollars (yes, you read that correctly).
I'm not doing the math, but I do recall that time on those phones was _very_ expensive. Dollars per minute.
And, in those days if you didn't press the 'end' button to terminate the call, regardless of the other party hanging up, it kept an open line. I remember my dad getting several hundred dollar bills related to saying 'bye' and tossing the phone onto the passenger seat.
Eastern Europe country, so when we finally broke off Russia we went to implement very fast Western technologies. This also coupled with the fact that during Communism era fixed phone were something to wait years to be approved off made cell phone penetration extremely fast. People were starving for communication so it didn't matter that we barely had food, we still wanted cell phones.
And not ten of millions, just ten is enough. Call your family and few friends under this trick and oops, you're good to pay an extra dollar at the end of the month.
I said tens of millions since you said it was a few cents for each subscriber, but one million dollars for every hour. (Perhaps I did not read that correctly?)
Yeah, I meant that each time you get that voice mail you'd pay a few cents. If my memory serve me correctly was 5 cents for initial 20 seconds and then 1 cent for each 10 seconds after that.
As a side anecdote, cell companies started a war among themselves with different features to lure customers from one network to another, and one of those features was at one time that initial 3 seconds were free, and after them it kicked the normal fees. So here I was a student in University campus and absolutely every single student had a cell, but you'd call your friends something like: "Hi X, it's me Y" and click, close the phone. Then call "I need this course" and click, close the phone. And so on and so forth until you'd finish your conversation. And at the end of the month when cell company was issuing the bill, you'd receive a very thick envelope that would have like 50 pages in it and the majority of it would read like this for each row: <destination number> - <begin time> - <duration> - <price>, where <duration> would be something like 1 second or 2 seconds, and <price> would be "free". It didn't last, cause companies understood they were losing money by printing those pages so it was a feature for like couple of months, but oh boy that was fun. Good times.
“Ya,” Burke replied, punctuating his message with the sack of money emoji.</Quote>
Heh, amateurs. Let me tell you guys a story from my country, from 90's. So in those years cell phones started to become the norm. You know, those Nokia brick types (which had like 1 week of battery in them before requiring charging) but the service was like this. You would call your contact then around 4 or 5 rings will give you plenty of time to close the call, and after that a voice mail message would inform you the contact was not answering and inviting you to leave a message. Problem was that if you went that far, then you'd pay for those seconds when the automated voice mail be initiated just like if your contact would've answered. So far so good. But one CEO of a cell company decided he wanted money. So randomly, he would enable the automated voice mail message to enter just after one ring. Now, individually that was not expensive, around few cents for each subscriber, but on the whole network this would mean for every hour this trick was pulled the company would win one million dollars (yes, you read that correctly).