Truth Thru Telephony (T3)

‘Go to the telephone company’ grunted my boss one day. I almost believed I was back in my junior days of a trainee when I was asked to visit the telephone company for disputed amounts in the bill. But a quick reality check brought me back to the morning meeting of the office and my chair just third from the Chairman. I started getting red in the face when the Strategy Manager of New Technologies stood up to explain that they were having problems with one telephone company and in such cases ‘we seniors’ always pitch in. ‘What is there to it? I agreed to visit them immediately as my mind scanned the names of my contacts who was a qualified telecom engineer at a senior level for some back-up.

The car stopped at a SEEPZ located building with the name of the company emblazoned on it. Underneath the logo was a quote from Mahatma Gandhi about Truth being all powerful. I acknowledge the logo of T3 and waved myself brazenly fast to the chambers of the CEO. ‘Our advertising company asked your help’ he introduced me to the problem. This confused me more because we were into strategy design and advertising agencies came much much later. I never realized that the tail could wag the dog. ‘Tell me more’ I barked trying to hide my confusion.

‘We were in the business of cellular telephony technology. We were developing products to extract more out of the bandwidth and increase the range of each tower to lower the costs of the service provider’ he started the prologue of his issue. ‘One day, the Directors asked us to develop some specialization to distinguish us from others as an IPO was planned. We went to the market and purchased the software which predicted the death of the caller to the emergency department’. ‘No commercial value’ I sighed as the market would be all government departments in all countries and they would not even let the company get the return on investment for next 100 years. ‘We knew that but our technicians wanted the source code to tweak it’. ‘Tweak it?’ I wondered it was an errant boy whose ears could be tweaked.

‘Tweaking is what we call when we innovate’ his words reminded me of a management lecture decades earlier. Here he was translating contemporary lingo into old terms for me, making me suddenly feel older. ‘If that is a legal issue then we are not the right ones to advice you’ I tried to get away from the assignment I had still not understood. ‘On the contrary, we were immensely successful’ he beamed pushing a file in front of me.

In that file was the history of ‘innovations made’ from the single application which could be used only by emergency departments. Now, if the client used their contraption between their telephone and ear, they could read on the monitor whether the caller was speaking the truth! ‘And the problem is?’ I asked him. ‘The agency cannot fathom what to communicate’ he replied. I laughed so much that I had tears and it was a long time since I had laughed so much without any alcohol. When I calmed down I realized that the problem was of plenty. The end uses were so much that our role of strategists was inevitable. I started jotting down for the client.

‘The maximum use and where there is not likely to be price sensitivity will be the Banks, and all Creditors which would include all businesses. When their customers or Bank borrowers say ‘cheque is in the mail’ their monitors will display NO CHEQUE DRAWN YET’ I drew the first campaign outline for a period of 2 months. ‘Next put your monitor in the shape of a heart and market it to the teens for finding out what truth their potential partners are speaking.’ Though I was on the roll, he interjected. ‘We can also tweak our product to translate the words of a female because we all know that females say one thing but mean another.’ Seeing my puzzled face he gave an example, ‘If the boyfriend asks if she will come for a weekend to Khandala, she would say no but the monitor would say, ONLY IF YOU BRING PROTECTION. This way we can even jazz up their romance.’ My jaw was still in the same open position.

I continued, ‘You can make the red telephone copy of what the US President had as hotline to the Russian Premier and ensure that at this high level diplomatic words are translated’. His eyes widened as he calculated mentally the number of countries in the world and said, ‘You mean that when the neighbor President promises to take care of insurgents the monitor will display FAR FROM STOPPING THEM, I WILL HELP THEM FIND ANOTHER ROUTE UNTIL MY SPONSOR PULLS ME UP.’ I sipped the lemon tea that his peon had brought in and reminded him that he would need to restructure his company as he was poised for a leap frog in growth to a multinational status overnight. If I were speaking to him on the phone he would see on his monitor, CALLER ENLARGING HIS PROJECT TO INCREASE FEES. But I was not on the phone and he appreciated my point as he asked me to send a proposal that would permit us to cover revenue of the next five years in one month.

As I left his office I started sweating in fear after realizing that this machine was beyond the truth serum or narco test. Each time I would answer my wife that I was busy in the office while sipping drinks at a bar, if she had this monitor I would be done for. Other cheating husbands would be in a fix as they would never convince their wife that their secretary was good at short hand only. I wondered if on the brighter side, this would make the society a bit more truthful and moral. But I was more confident in the imagination and ‘innovative’ spirit of man when some other company would develop a device that would convert all the signals conveying warning about untruth statements to truth. After all, more than three decades ago when the US police used laser systems to catch speeding vehicles, the speed lovers could buy devices that warned them of such speed checks before they were caught. The game of chess continues…………..