Adventures in Public Relations

Speaking of Island Tel, er, Aliant, they announced their SMS messaging network today with great fanfare. Here’s a clip from their news release:

The service is being marketed to two distinct groups – to businesspeople who will likely use text messaging to ‘ease the pressure’ of demands of work and family – and to youth who are expected to use the service mainly for making social plans and staying in touch with friends.

“Hello Kenneth, it is your youth friend Wil’ chatting. I would like to make some social plans with you for the forenoon. Are you agreeable?”

“Alas William, I am not, as I have alternate social plans with my chums. It is nice to be able to ease the pressure with this technologic marvel, agree you not?”

But perhaps I judge too harshly, for the release continues:

Reports out of the UK also point to an SMS language of abbreviations catching on such as PC (please call) and BCNU (be seeing you) and a resurgence in use of the old telegram favorites such as TTFN (ta ta for now).

It is nice to see that the reports from the UK have finally reached Aliant Headquarters in Halifax; I presume they were travelling on the Royal Mail Schooner, which would explain the company’s starry-eyed amazement at this “new phenomenon.”

But I shouldn’t make such fun of my sporting partners so.