Gather 'round, kiddies, and we'll regale you with a cautionary tale designed to illustrate how not tuning in to AtAT on a daily basis could well cost you millions of dollars. You have probably long since come to the conclusion that, in recent years, Motorola has apparently become the most incompetent processor manufacturer since Shemp from the Three Stooges joined forces with a one-armed Weird Harold from "Fat Albert" and the two started making chips by whacking small piles of sand with a mallet. (That chip would later go on to become the original Intel Celeron, but we digress.) The thing is, you may have entertained the notion that just because Motorola's processor business isn't exactly stellar with the delivery deadlines, that doesn't mean that the company's bread and butter-- its mobile phone business-- is run the same way.

Oh, you poor, trusting fools. See, as faithful viewer Thomas Brady pointed out, CNET reports that Verizon Wireless, Cingular, and AT&T Wireless all thought the same thing, and now they're about to pay for their naïveté in the form of missed opportunity. Just last July Motorola told analysts that it'd be shipping camera phones "by the fourth quarter," so all three wireless carriers ordered and were expecting shipments of camera phones from Motorola in time for the imminent holiday shopping craze. The thing is, the fourth quarter starts in two days, and Motorola still hasn't even set a formal date for the phones' release. In other words, the odds of those phones making it to the wireless carriers in time for the holiday rush are about the same as the odds of Motorola shipping 20,000 1.3 GHz G4s to Apple by, um, last May.

The point here is this: if you were running a major wireless service carrier, would you have put the fate of your holiday season revenue in the hands of Motorola? No, of course you wouldn't, because thanks to our patented method of pummelling deceased equines, you know all about how badly Apple's been burned by missed Motorolan delivery dates on multiple occasions, and you'd have rather lit your company's cash reserves on fire and stuffed the flaming wad down your own pants than bet the firm's future on Motorola actually making a deadline for once. It's clear that the CEOs of Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, and Cingular aren't faithful AtAT viewers, and now they're all suffering the fate of the woefully ignorant. Remember, to be forewarned is to have forearms.

So if you were thinking about leaving us behind and maybe just getting your drama from one of the other daytime soaps, you should probably reconsider. Stay tuned for additional cautionary tales in the days ahead, illustrating such points as how not watching AtAT could leave your hair flat, lifeless, and devoid of body; how skipping even a single episode of AtAT might lead to heroin addiction and a penchant for collecting little ceramic horses; and how not sending us all your money and worldly possessions could well lead to your messy demise by accidental exposure to poison ivy and the Ebola virus.