#174 Dial-down

So I’m watching a commercial the other night. It was pretty creative. Still, I could feel just a touch of desperation in it. Like when a company is hanging on by its fingernails and it’s doing everything it can to get your business back. Like they used to have your business, but were so arrogant, that the world passed them by and now they’re out at the end of a technological dead end and doing some serious stock market starving. The 800 pound gorilla is looking a little Kate Moss-like, if you get my drift.
Anyhow, could be I was reading a lot into it. Cause my personal experience with AOL, when I tried to cancel my subscription a few years back, was none to good. They kept offering me more and more free hours with surcharges to kick in at some unspecified time, of course, that I got a little frustrated. The salesperson slash account executive closer-saver guy reminded me of another old-fashioned technology. Can you say broken record?
So this commercial was about how AOL, now that DSLs and Cable modems have passed them by, still has a place in everyone’s life as an internet screener anti-virus anti-spammer interface. First rule of marketing, describe what you can do for a potential client not what you can save them from. You can use chewing gum to plug a hole in a boat but most people buy it for the flavor.
So this ad goes on and on about how the clutter coming down your cable modem can eventually infest your computer bad enough so that it slows down to the point of pointlessness vis-à-vis that whole fast cable modem thing. What they were hovering around in the ad, but couldn’t quite say without alienating their dwindling core customer, was that your cable would get as slow as, ahem, dial up.
But here’s how they put it. “Your internet experience can run up to 500% slower.” Now that sounds pretty bad. In fact, as near as I can figure, that means my computer will run 4 times less slow than when it’s off. That is really, really slow. I’m not completely sure how this can work but, hey, I’m not the geniuses at AOL. Must be some sort of new quantum thing.
You see, it’s possible to have something go 500% faster. Each hundred percent refers to one. So 500% faster means five times faster. But if you’re going less, or slower, you can only divide up the one amount that you start with. So half as fast is 50% slower. 100% slower is zero. Not moving at all. Zilch. Nada. Wait a minute. If I was 500% higher at the top of a ladder, and then 100% lower when I went back to ground level, where would I be if I stepped in “a hole”? Hmm. What was that nickname we used to call AOL?
America ya gotta love it.