Dan Enthoven | Cingular Wireless | Virgin Mobile | offer escape-a-date type services

Your personal ad worked, it’s Friday night, and you’ve realized your blind date is jobless, charmless, and clueless. Suddenly your cellphone rings. It’s Aunt Mabel and she needs a ride from the airport. What luck, huh? Not really. Cingular Wireless and Virgin Mobile both offer escape-a-date type services where customers can schedule date-canceling calls. Customers get one of eight random, rotating messages — from the airport excuse to the more unusual, such as a friend getting bitten by an iguana, says Dan Enthoven, director of marketing at BeVocal, a software company that records and handles the messages. “It grew out of our business for doing wake-up calls,” he says. Well, it is definitely a wake-up call for someone on the date.
— Beth Snyder Bulik