Rednecks and Ringtones

In my 11 months at AT&T, I’ve learned a lot of things. About cell phones and people mostly. Nothing earth-shattering, really, just general things.

For some reason, and I can’t quite seem to get my head around it, rednecks go absolutely bat shit for ringtones.

To clarify:

I take between 30-60 calls a day, predominantly from Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. In other words, the redneck states. And I kid you not, there’s a 50/50 shot they’re calling about ringtones.

What is the fascination with ringtones, honestly?

You pay $2.50 for 45 seconds of your favorite song, when you can buy the whole damn song on iTunes for 99 cents.

I talked to a lady today who was pissed off because her memory card wouldnt work with the warranty phone AT&T sent her to replace the old. What were the contents of her memory card?

183 ringtones. One hundred and eighty three ringtones.

That’s like $500 in ringtones. That’s absolutely absurd. And I know she didn’t have $500 to just throw around because she was from Seagoville.

(Side bar: For those of you who didn’t have the misfortune of growing up in Mesquite, a redneck town in its own right, and the butthole of the DFW Metroplex, Seagoville is the butthole of Mesquite. So, for those of you scoring at home, Seagoville is the butthole of the butthole of Dallas. Rednecks and speed freaks as far as the eye can see.)

Another lady I talked to spent 9 hours trying to get a ringtone. Now, I love to waste time, I can do it with the best of them, but nine hours is a really long time. She basically spent an entire work day trying to download, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere”, which I found to be hilariously ironic.

I guess I just don’t get it. I work with cell phones all day and so these things piss me off.

Maybe AT&T should come up with a new line of ringtones specifically for rednecks. They could have a whole series called, “NASCAR sounds”, and it would just be one clip of a stock car going 900 miles an hour…

“wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh…..”

…and then list it 50 different times on the website as ‘Dale Jr. Engine tone’, ‘Tony Stewart Engine tone’or whatever..and sell it a million times over.

I can see the news report now.

A friendly game of, “Name that engine” gone horribly awry.

One dead, two injured. Tonight at 9.