What did a 64 year old Washington DC lawyer like Hank Levine do to promote a text-bombing episode that drained the telco lawyer’s phone battery and had him running to a burrito store?
Sound strange?
Well the issue arose following a campaign by burrito chain Chipotle who said their customers needed to text 888-222 with the word “raincheck” to qualify for a free burrito.
The only problem was the locals are accustomed to dialling a seven-digit number and if they had Levine’s area code the messaged reached Bethesda-based Levine’s cell phone, which took in over 300 messages with the ‘raincheck’ message last Monday.
Chipotle has a mere 2000 stores
, a 64-year-old Bethesda, Md., lawyer, received more than 300 text messages Monday containing just one word: raincheck. – Same below:
Levinewas the soul of reason and courtesy when the first text arrived and he wrote the first texter back saying that he or she had the wrong number.
And then they came – flooding the phone with unread text messages.
“The first thing I did was get my free burrito, because I don’t dislike burritos,” Levine told the Washington Post, explaining that soon after he learned what was going on, he dialed the correct number to participate in the promotion.
Levine, who occasionally eats at Chipotle, quickly learned how deep some people’s loyalty to the chain runs.
“Some people texted five or six times, almost in despair, so I responded to them,” said Levine, who is a telecommunications lawyer and understands the technicalities of why the texts were directed to him even though people didn’t put in an area code. “The range of responses is enormous.”
Although the promotion has ended, Levine says he’s still receiving “raincheck” texts. He even went to his neighborhood Chipotle to show them his phone inbox, but the employees there said there was not much they could do. For now, he’s having fun with it all. His story was first spotted by Tech Insider, which prompted him to create a Twitter account Monday night. He sent his first tweet, and has been fielding media requests ever since.
“Frankly, the only really bad thing for me is that it’s draining my phone battery,” Levine said. “But I can deal with that. That problem has been overcome.”
All of which shows how online campaigns can work effectively. And it’s not everytime that they will reach a lawyer who is going into instant lawsuit mode to remedy the nuisance factor of misdirected texts for free food.
Source: Washington Post
