You have seen a more difficult regular Thursday though, haven’t you?
Remember when phone companies charged for long distance, had blocks of time on weekends reserved for free phone calls, and had international calling plans that cost as much as a cup of coffee? There were 10-10 numbers, 1-800-Collect, and numerous celebrity spokespersons to make sense of it all.
It doesn’t feel like that long ago, but we still had these types of phone plans in 2000. The advent of free long distance and charges for things that basically eliminated all of these pay-per-minute type of calling plans have made making a phone call slightly more cost effective. Of course, it also helps that technology has also evolved, making it even cheaper as long as you have a good internet connection.
As for phones and phone bills, we still pay plenty, but at least we’re not also paying per minute.
2000 seems fairly close to my cut off for where I stop pulling commercials for my collection. In actuality, I stop at 2001. Today’s commercial came from a tape I recorded in September 2000. I was starting my senior year of high school, I didn’t have a cell phone (but I had a private line – remember how cool it was to have one of those?), my family had dial-up internet (which was connected to that private phone line), and my mom and my aunt (who passed away in 2013) would talk on the phone every Saturday morning because of one of those “free nights and weekends” calling plans.
This commercial is for MCI (acquired in 2006 by Verizon Communications), and it totes one of those international calling plans. In it, we have a mom (in the United States) and her mom (in France) discussing the pitfalls of “such a difficult child.”
Click play and find out how difficult!
You know we grow up and have kids, and don’t realize how difficult we were?
This mom knows.
At least we can save money talking about it on the phone!
One hour free? Let’s get our obligatory monthly phone call done in one hour. How fast can you talk?!
MCI and WorldCom merged in 1997 to create MCI WorldCom, and in 1999 almost merged with AT&T. The deal forcibily fell through due to opposition from the United States Department of Justice and the European Union on concerns that this merger would create a monopoly. Because you know, we don’t have a gimormous company gobbling up all the local cable companies these days, right?
MCI filed for bankruptcy in 2002, emerged in 2004, and was acquired by Verizon in 2005, officially ceasing to exist in 2006.
Jeez, I hate writing about stuff like this.
But we’ll always have the commercials, right?
And there you have it, another commercial from the archives that is on the later end of my cut off. Please do come back tomorrow, I’ll have candy.
No seriously, the commercial mentions candy.
It’s not about candy, it just mentions it.
Have a great Thursday! 🙂