Download!Download Point responsive WP Theme for FREE!

You’ve Got Fail!

Got a cool trick up my sleeve to dazzle a client with to prove you care about them more than you care about not pissing off a Black Swan audience (some guy got shot in France for that you know, great movie), that in addition to being able to contact you normally they are also able, if you don’t field the email soon, to send an email to a certain address, like urgent@asdf.com or skyisfalling@asdf.com, and in doing so making my phone go completely crazy until I shut it up by pulling up the urgent email or the battery died and, if I could get her to agree with this, it would also freak out my wife’s phone too for good measure.

Text messages too (why not) and if I had a landline, with Google Voice, I don’t know, some additional freakiness.

A variety of ways to accomplish this and I’m sure mine isn’t by any means the best but hey, maybe it would work for you and you hadn’t thought of this so here’s how I just did it on my Google phone:

Wait, pause that colon cliffhanger, gotta get this out of my system if you don’t mind (you don’t mind, do you?).

I created an urgent-sounding email address alias on the client’s domain, I set up a filter with Google that takes any mail sent to that address and forwards to another email address (I used my own server but you could use a Gmail account, anything with IMAP, whatever), I went through all the Android notifications and alarms and gathered up a bunch of appropriate sounding notifications and alarms, I stitched them all together and looped them into one three hour file, saved it, dropped it on my SD, configured the urgent account on K-9, an Android email client which lets you specify different notifications for different accounts you add, assigned it the long-ass ring which alternates between extremely obnoxious and gentle and gave it an aggressive vibration pattern — done!

Yeah you’re right, one more full-width shot of that broad with the unconvincing dye job (so what, who cares):

Yes, thank you Captain Obvious, this relies on Google being up and it would take Google going down to get these people to try to email me over something urgent in which case I wouldn’t get the alert making this whole thing stupid but that’s the whole point, don’t you see, that I stand behind my resold product not going down long enough for any of these clients to notice it and get irritated enough to try and fail to email my regular address for help and then email my urgent address. Yeah I know Google’s had a few Fail Whales here and there but hey man, you tell me how Google stacks up against anyone else who provides half the services Google does.

Anti-fanboy ballbreaking ginger-bashing jive turkey.

Doug Simmons

12 Comments