I suppose you could say the kids have coughs and colds. You know it’s time to step up the home delivery of Kleenex when you have to call the fire brigade out — twice — to deal with the putrid green snotty slick oozing out of the house and causing minor traffic accidents and pedestrian distress outside. I don’t know where it comes from. I’m losing my confidence in the idea of conservation of mass. For sure we don’t put this much matter into them.
Parenthood. Intra Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Anyhow, I dragged the older infection vector up Calton Hill here in Edinburgh yesterday. Earlier pictures here. As part of the Geddes Offspring Incentive Programme, madam was offered the opportunity to place a call to Nana from the top of the hill. (She’s twenty points in debt, so no payout this Christmas, but you can cut them some slack from time to time to keep their spirits up. No doubt the idea that there was a time you couldn’t make calls from anywhere is a truly alien concept to her anyway.)
Now, it would also be nice to show Nana the sunny view from the top of the hill. But an MMS doesn’t cut it, as most of the point of the exercise is madam hearing Nana’s suprise and delight at being contacted. So a phone call is mandatory. Yet as we don’t have a show and tell communicator function, these two activities are separate.
So, how about this for an idea. MMS isn’t about messaging. This use case is about reinforcing relationships, sharing experiences, and saying you’re thinking of someone. So what if I could tag my MMS with a free callback? A reverse-charge call in a bottle. A virtual one-shot calling card taped on in a virtual envelope. It isn’t hard to imagine the user experience, with some suitable message appended below in the picture viewer. It’s also rather telco-centric: innovate in the payment and pricing, not the product features.
As it happens, our precocious customer got 98% of the way to the summit objective before being distracted by the back-road down the hill and failing to top out. So no phone call today. You’ve got to keep your eye on the treats budget, after all.
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