My click-through rate on online ads is somewhere around zero: maybe one every couple of months (but hey, advertisers, keep spending the ad dollars on the Internet: it's the easiest way you can get impressions from me!) at best. But then a Telus ad made a promise so absurdly underachieving I couldn't believe it: If they drop 1% of your calls, they'll give you a small credit on your bill.

Now, I know a small amount about reliability and performance in stuff like computer networks, where something like five nines of service (99.999% uptime) is considered a hard but achievable metric. Terrestrial phone services use "five nines" as a basic standard of availability (and routinely hit it: when's the last time you picked up a phone and didn't get a dial tone?). This isn't quite the same as Telus' pathetic promise (they are implicitly promising better than 99% network availability), but the Telus promise isn't even trying. My wife and I both have mobile phones on the same (non-Telus) network, and I can't recall the last time either phone dropped a call or even had no signal.

This "promise" is so bad it actually makes me doubt the quality of Telus' network in a way I had never contemplated before. It's as if my favourite restaurant suddenly put up ads saying "guaranteed rat-free!"

They compound their bizarre marketing mistake with a pathetically mincing promise of compensation: if they DO drop 1% of their calls over a year, they'll...credit you a minute for each dropped call, to a maximum of 100 minutes. Woo! They're offering me a miniscule discount on a service whose marginal cost of provision is practically zero! I'm as happy as a little girl! It's as if my favourite restaurant put up ads saying "rat-free food, or 10% off your bill!"

So here's to Telus, for the least brilliant promotion since . . . hm. I couldn't google a worse one. Suggestions in the comments?