I didn’t see these AT&T ads because not only did I not live here in 1993, but I didn’t have cable, and indeed, my TV wasn’t plugged in for a couple of years (unplugged it to move it once, forgot to plug it back in and just never bothered after that because I didn’t care), but they’re pretty cool, and considering that was 16 years ago, also fairly accurate. Granted, I don’t have voice-activated keyless entry for my front door, but the technology does exist to make that possible, and I do have keyless entry for the car. There’s no such thing as a phone booth anymore, but Skype and a laptop work pretty much the same if you want to tuck the kids in but you can’t be there to do it in person. You don’t swipe a card to pay tolls with EZ-Pass (or similar services), but it’s essentially the same thing, and although the fax is pretty much dead technology, I could certainly write a note, save it as an image or a PDF and email it to someone so he or she could experience the joy that is “reading my handwriting”. We generally don’t read scans of books on huge screens, but that’s because we have it even better with digital copies that we can read on computers, ebook readers like Kindle, or even on our phones (props to Project Gutenberg for making available so many classics!) Anyway, much as I hate commercials, this montage is pretty accurate, considering that much of the tech they’re describing either didn’t exist at all or was in its infancy back then. It did take me a minute or so to realise that’s Tom Selleck doing the voiceover.

Shame that it’s AT&T, though, and the person who wrote this was dead-on accurate:

• Have you ever wanted to open your phone bill and find out your long-distance company has changed without your permission?
• Have you ever wanted a telephone billing plan so complicated even Stephen Hawking couldn’t explain it to you?
• Have you ever dreamed what it would be like to be billed for phone calls you’ve never made?
• Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m sorry the Bell System monopoly was broken up. It would be better if we had one monolithic phone company like we had in the 1980s?
• Have you ever wanted to be forced to deal with a second rate, overpriced communications provider in order to be able to use the most innovative and popular domestic communications device?
• Have you ever had your local phone company gobbled up by a multinational corporation who then jacks up your rates and offers inferior customer service?
• Have you ever had all your personal private Internet data archived by the government secretly and illegally?
• Have you ever had your phones tapped and recorded in violation of the Constitution?
• Have you ever had a company operate above the law and then get politicians to retroactively give immunity for their illegal, and unethical activities?

You will, and the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.

We haven’t had a phone company as such for several years, but at one time we did have AT&T (whatever incarnation it took back then), and I can personally attest to the fact that the bill was indecipherable, and that we did get billed for services we’d never used and calls we didn’t make, and that trying to get a live person for anything other than sales was an exercise in frustration (and ultimately, in futility, since I often gave up). Never mind the pain in the arse of having to choose a company to provide local service, then choose another to provide long-distance service. That’s part of the reason we switched to Charter Telephone almost the instant the service became available here. I wouldn’t have AT&T now were it not for in-network calls to P. (their company switched from Verizon to AT&T last year), the iPhone (well, “the iPhone…legally”) and the fact that when it comes to the big wireless companies, none of them is really good and they’ll all arse-rape you about the same (“Verizon math”, anyone?) and also that the only ones with decent service here are AT&T and Verizon (Sprint isn’t bad, but they’re often initially left out of cool new third-party apps because the bigger companies get supported first).