“So what sort of stuff do people text?”, ask excited people who’ve only just heard of 63336.
Well, the range of questions is enormous. Even the variety of straightforward information requests is vast. We’re more than happy to tell you when your next train is (we do best if you tell us where you are and where you want to go), which is the taller one between Ant & Dec (it’s Ant, by 2 inches), or where you can get UGG boots in Luton.[i]
Then there’s the simple demand “Send me some useless facts” – to which we might reply with something like “The back of the knee is called the popliteal fossa. Horses can’t vomit. George W Bush used to be a cheerleader, as did Samuel L Jackson & Steve Martin.” You know – fun things.
However, it’s not all trains, nauseous horses and footwear. People will text 63336 with anything.
OK, we did ask for it – we’ve always said our service is “Any Question Answered”. When you invite the British public to “text ANY question” (as emphasised by the eyebrows of our lovely “one of the 63336″ at the end of this advert
naturally, that’s what you’re going to get: ANY question, way beyond the realms of facts, figures and phone numbers.
What’s going to happen to me?
Let’s do a bit of keyword analysis (which is definitely our kind of thing).
About 1,400 texts per month start “When will I…”. These aren’t people asking about when they’ll reach Abergavenny on the 17.34 from Newport – they’re asking us to predict the future for them. They might be
• “When will I get a place of my own?”
• “When will I hear about the interview I had today?”
• “When will I next kiss Emily?”
350 other customers, equally plagued by the mosquitoes of uncertainty, ask “What will happen…”, and then there’s a whole group of the exasperated “Why won’t…” questions – and uh-oh, now we’re in the realms of “Why won’t he listen when I talk to him?” and “Why won’t she text me back?”. Big old cans of worms, those.
But this is stuff that really bothers people, and we won’t shy away from it.
A big chunk of questions every week feature the phrase “I feel”. (Again, this isn’t counting those people who text with “Help me: It’s 2am and I feel like a kebab”.) In certain circumstances, 63336 gives out the Samaritans phone number, but we will try to help there and then with a caring and practical response to most troubles. Many people just want to know that someone’s heard what they’re saying, and that they’re not alone.
How do you…?
Finally, there are the embarrassing questions – not that anything can really embarrass 63336. Trust me when I say that 63336 has seen it all (including William Shatner’s performance of Rocket Man, and it doesn’t get much more embarrassing than that).
At its most basic level, there’s “How do you have sex?”[ii] – which is asked about once a day – and from there, it gets a lot more specific. If anyone’s ever done, imagined doing, or heard about someone else doing something – ahem – physically unusual, we’ll have had a question or two (or 500) about it.
Am I normal?
On questions of the body, let’s return to our keyword analysis. Here are some rough monthly figures which, really, speak for themselves:
|
Word or phrase |
Relevant instances
|
|
what’s wrong with my… |
80 |
|
normal |
270 |
|
how big is the average… |
1145 |
|
smell |
500 |
|
my … looks weird |
66 |
|
itchy |
185 |
So… Why?
So some wonder why anyone would spend £1 asking an anonymous service about something to which there isn’t any right answer (or at least, not yet). There are a few reasons.
Firstly, 63336 has 1,000 thoughtful, intelligent people at the receiving end of that agonised question. Many have stacked up decades of life experience, and all have a genuine desire to help the customer in whatever way happens to be needed.
They can also look back at a history of questions from the same customer which contextualise the current dilemma – a bit like a therapist making notes of the client’s weekly issues. When you consider that one therapist costs about £45 an hour – and you can bet they’ll keep you coming back week after week – the £1 spent to get a reassuring, caring and insightful response to whatever’s bugging you seems pretty economical.
Secondly, using a service like ours is completely private. People want to share their burdens, but perhaps not publicly, so they turn to something personal to them – their mobile.
It’s just a text – no-one will ever know you asked (except us, and we keep everything absolutely confidential). It slips quietly through the ether and back without your name on it, and you don’t have to look anyone in the eye. And we’re pretty sure a therapist would want your name and a bit of eye contact, pretty much as a minimum.
63336 loves you too
So it makes sense, really. 63336 is the agony aunt you can write to who’ll write back straight away, and who won’t tell anyone you wrote. Actually, thinking about it, it’s also the one who will listen, the one who’ll always text you back, and the one who’s patient enough to give you a kind answer even at 4 in the morning. Not just an agony aunt – the ideal partner.
No wonder we get two marriage proposals every day. We also get “I love you” 3 times, and about 400 kisses – although the simple “Fancy a pint?” comes in at a more matey rate of 2.5 times a week.
We’ve found people respond to, and seem to appreciate, the invitation to “text ANY question”. Out of the nearly 21m questions we’ve answered from 2.1m customers, we’ve helped people not only get home when they’ve missed the last train, but know what to say to their other half when they get there.
[i] Schuh stock UGG boots, and there’s a branch in Luton’s Arndale Centre, as well as The Harlequin in Watford. They also have an efficient mail order service.
[ii] Other versions received include “How do you have sex with a boy?”; “How do you have sex with a girl?”; and “How do you have sex with a fence?”.
