AT&T Mobility Has Death Camps

LITTLEROCK, AR – Former AT&T executive, Lance Wilkerson, revealed at a press conference what many U.S. citizens had suspected for some time – that the cellular phone company operates a series of labor and death camps as punishment for any customer daring to opt out of their two-year contract. This gulag archipelago starts at the notorious Nome, Alaska facility, slated for people who have tried to defect to Verizon or Sprint, to the almost equally harsh camp in the Florida Everglades, which, says Wilkerson, may be his next address – that is, if the AT&T secret police allows him to live long enough to swat mosquitoes the size of Nokia N75s that sting at list price.

The company, which began as Cingular One, still refers to itself as a Dictatorship of the Free Wireless. To quote from last week’s official organ, Prav-dah:

“We offer free wireless telephone service to anyone willing to pay a huge arbitrary monthly fee for the rest of his or her natural life. Anyone wanting to leave our system will be considered an enemy of anti-monopoly-monopoly. To complain that you get no reception will be deemed a criminal offense to be corrected at one of our re-education camps located outside the range of even Verizon.”

Wilkerson said that AT&T is indeed engaged in an ongoing revolution against free choice. Company operatives are trained to lure the customer into a death trap with the promise that they will be released from phone servitude after two years. Later the operatives will instruct the wireless user to read the print at the bottom of their contract that is so small as to be written on the cellular level; and since few people own an electron microscope, they never really understand why their parole is extended far into the future with impossible-to-meet escape penalties and new phones that cost more than a house but less than a toothbrush if bought with another two-year contract. AT&T has even hired attractive woman agents to sleep with possible defectors to gain information as to the whereabouts of their credit card numbers.

The AT&T propaganda machine will also have to address further damage to its public image with the soon to be released novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Cellunisovich. It was written by Alex Sprintzhinitsyn, who, ten years ago, had paid the escape penalty to free himself from his then Cingular One contract and was all prepared to return to a simpler time of a land-line telephone. But later that night, he was visited by the Cingular One secret police at his home in Dyer, Indiana and was never heard from again…until now. He wrote the novel in his head while traveling from one Cingular/AT&T work camp to another, living on Slim Jims and Mountain Dew. He describes how the inmates were forced to assemble phones, headsets and re-chargers under the watchful eye of the camp director, a man with an eye patch and a tendency to whistle through his nose when reading Nokia phone manuals.

“There was a time,” said Wilkerson, “when Ma Bell was the only phone company in town and people viewed it as telecommunication royalty, undemocratic. But Ma Bell’s dictatorship was benevolent as compared to AT&T’s Dictatorship of the Free Wireless. Ma Bell did not have death camps, sinister hookers and guys with eye patches. Nor did Ma Bell twist the English language to have ‘free’ mean ‘expensive,’ or ‘choice’ to mean ‘monopoly.’

“It was Prav-dah who told the people to ‘Rise up against Ma Bell, you have only your network reception to lose.” So now I, along with Mr. Sprintzhinitsyn, say to all you folks living under the pall of this evil regime, AT&T Mobility, ‘Rise up, you have only the prospect of annoying other people in crowded restaurants with your senseless cell phone chattering to lose.’”

Wilkerson had just finished up with those words when men in masks rushed the podium, threw a black hood over his head and ushered the former AT&T executive to an awaiting black Suburban SUV and drove him off to what one can only guess will be a less cushy life.