Reporting the hand that gives you cellphones to the proper authorities.

Samsung, or their ad agency rather, threw a competition where you call a number of a phone to make it vibrate off of a plexiglas platform, onto concrete or into a tank with goldfish. The phones are of the rugged kind, so the competition killed two birds with one stone, providing both a neat online interactive experiment, as well as making the proof of the phones ruggedness conditional of winning it.

Naturally, I reported them to the animal rights people, as well as contacting Samsung directly. Had those fish instead been kittens — or if the phones literally were aimed for the previously mentioned birds — you wouldn’t have had to argue much before getting the animals removed from a stressful sitiation, but seeing as it’s much harder to sympathise with fish, it took a call from the department of agriculture for the fish to be removed.

I think it’s awesome that there are enough resources, and laws to direct said resources, to care even for the rights of really boring creatures. Having said that, I realise those fish might have been flushed down the crapper.

[flv:https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Samsungshakedown.flv https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Samsungshakedown.jpg 640 360]

The other part of the story is concerned with the cellphone marked “00” in the video above — barely missing the tank — which is the one I won by ringing frantically, shouting excitedly in front of my computer. I’m only half expecting a dead fish in the mail. I’m sure there is a moral to be learned here, and perhaps there’s even a suitable biblical parable, but I think Petter put it best using the ancient art of rhetorical questioning:

“You won a cellphone and reported them using your own name? You did not win a cellphone.”

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