Alibi can be lullaby to those in need
When Sara King wanted out of a blind date arranged by her family, she knew she needed a believable reason.
Something like “I got lost” or “I’m coming down with the flu” probably would have worked just fine.
King, a 23-year-old senior psychology student at the University of California-San Diego, was drawing a blank, though.
And like a lot of folks, she’d long ago run out of people in her inner circle to back up her occasional dog-ate-my-homework story.
So she did the next best thing and turned to the 7,000-member strong Alibi and Excuse Club for help.
King initially joined the club as a lark, she said, explaining she “just wanted to have fun with it and give some crazy responses. … I saw people saying things like ‘Help me, I need to come to work late today. What do I say to my boss?’ “
A popular answer to that question, King said, came from a club member in Hawaii, who suggested the person in need tell the boss he’d stepped on a puffer fish.
When it came to her own problem, though, King obviously couldn’t turn to friends or family for help.
“I didn’t want them to know I didn’t want to go,” King said of her family. “So I asked people from the club to help. … I basically said, ‘Help, I have a blind date. What do I say? How do I get out of it?’ “
Yes, it’s exactly as it sounds: a club where lies – some told in pure humor, and plenty of others rooted in deceit – are generated to help get other club members off their respective hot seats.
But unlike other clubs, Alibi and Excuse members don’t gather in one room. They meet infrequently and then only in the etherworld, by using technology from Internet communi- cations company sms.ac to send text messages, pictures and music from their computers, cell phones and PDAs to the personal communication devices of the entire membership.
Wondering what the “sms” is all about? What Americans call text-
messaging, every other country in the world calls “short message service.”
Dozens of club members responded to King’s query immediately, advising her to tell the date she had to work late or that a pipe in her home had burst.
The fix came, though, when another club member offered to call King’s cell phone five minutes into the date with “an emergency.”
It worked. She wasn’t feeling her date anyway, so when King got that call, she apologetically excused herself and left to “help” a non-existent friend in distress.
There are many tales to tell, and the Web site hosts a number of stories. Greg Wilfahrt, the executive vice president and co-founder of sms.ac, also had some to share:
There was the Texas woman, who, after going through a divorce, continued to live in the same home with her child and ex-husband, for the child’s sake.
At some point she wanted to begin dating again but didn’t want to hurt the ex’s feelings. So rather than place an ad or go to a pickup joint, the woman turned to the Alibi club for help in arranging dates. Club members would help her set times and places with new dates so that suspicious calls to her home never had to be made.
Every now and then, the Alibi club crosses paths with fate, as in the case of an Arizona man several months ago who went to Colorado to visit a buddy and met a woman while he was there. The problem was the Arizona man had a girlfriend back home.
He felt a strong bond with the new woman, and when they made plans to reunite the following weekend, a gut feeling told him to do whatever it would take to make it happen. So he turned to the Alibi club.
After slogging through a number of suggestions, the man, who is a soccer player, got a winner: have another club member call his girlfriend posing as the coach of the University of Colorado men’s soccer team.
The plan hatched, the call was made and as expected, the girlfriend took a message and told her boyfriend that he’d gotten a recruitment call from the University of Colorado and that he needed to get back there for the weekend. Bottom line, the couple broke up. He and his new girlfriend are in a happy relationship.
But if you have a hobby, or special interest that doesn’t involve fibbing, or even just a need for streamlined data communications, don’t worry. There’s an sms club or service for you, too.
In just three years, sms.ac has grown from a company providing what amounted to a convenient high-tech paging and instant messaging system of sorts, to a worldwide network of channels and clubs that dwarfs even America Online’s specialty offerings.
Ask Wilfahrt, and he’ll tell you the company’s exponential growth – 10 million-plus members as of last summer – was all in the cards.
That growth has happened by word of mouth. The company hasn’t spent a penny on advertising, Wilfahrt said.
More than 150,000 user-created clubs have been started through sms.ac, from religion to flirting to musical interests, he added.
For 23-year-old Sujata Patel, a Brookfield, Wis., native and resident of Portland, Ore., the Friends channel is a life and dime saver.
Patel, a law student at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, said many of her friends live in different countries and time zones across the globe.
“I use their service to text message, mainly to people I know in the UK and Australia, but also in Wisconsin – particularly in the Madison area, since that’s where I went to college. And it is so quick that it can be like having a (real time) conversation with them,” Patel said, adding that cost is a factor, too.
According to Wilfahrt, in exchange for free sign up and club and channel access, sms.ac members agree to receive up to one advertisement on their phones or PDAs or Blackberries each day, though “in reality, it’s more likely to be just two or three ads per month.”
Next up for sms.ac is an attempt to develop and perfect technology that will allow simple cell phones to be conduits for more than just data like text messages.
“We’re talking streaming music that you choose (to be sent) to your phone,” Wilfahrt said. “The technology is not all there yet. But it will be. Your favorite music will be coming to you via your handset instead of your Walkman. Your handset will be your Walkman.”