If you unzipped the mask of Paul Marcarelli, the bespectacled, thirty-something actor from New York City who plays the Verizon Wireless ‘Can you hear me now?’ guy in commercials, you would find Greg Booze, a 53-year-old associate engineer from Annapolis who asks that question for a living.
Booze is one of 60 Verizon employees who simulates the lives of the company’s 42 million customers by driving the country’s most-traveled roads while testing the cellular networks of the six major carriers: ATT, Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
So the ‘Can you hear me now?’ guy is simply a personification of Booze and his colleagues. Booze says he doesn’t mind somebody else getting face time for his hard work, but he claims ‘TestMan,’ as Verizon calls him, stole his signature line.
“I used to say [Can you hear me now?] before the guy had the commercial,” he said during a test tour Friday in College Park.
Booze is around the campus infrequently, as all of Maryland and parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia are in his charge. When here, Booze usually travels down Route 1.
Working out of the company’s Annapolis Junction base, Booze evaluates networks in a pimped-out Chevy TrailBlazer that makes a souped-up Cadillac Escalade look like a trailer-trash mobile.
To prepare the TrailBlazer for testing, Verizon fit a $30,000 SUV with $500,000 of technology. Booze said being at the wheel of a half-million dollars keeps his attention.
“It helps me stay alert,” he said.
The technology helps Verizon test the coverage and capacity of its network, as well as its competitors’. Every two and a half minutes, the eight cell phones in the trunk of the TrailBlazer automatically call a server at the company’s Annapolis office.
The testing indicates to Verizon where the company should add a tower (for coverage) or just tweak one (for capacity). In his role, Booze serves as a watchdog for potential trouble areas.
“When I get a dropped call, I get excited,” he said. “I call the office and say, ‘Man, what’s going on?’”
Booze is keen enough to know, however, that not everyone is as tantalized by a dropped call. He appeared troubled upon learning that cell phone reception was notoriously bad in South Campus Commons buildings.
After looking into the matter, Verizon spokeswoman Sherri Cunningham said the company was aware of the issue and has started the long process of adding a cell tower to improve service. She said engineers think they have found an appropriate location, but before a cell tower can be installed, they must select a site, make a lease arrangement and have zoning approved.
While those plans form, the automatic test calls will continue. During each, automated male and female voices say phrases designed by linguistics researchers at Harvard University to replicate high-to-low human tones.
“It’s easy to tell the depth of a well,” “These days, a chicken leg is a rare dish,” “The boss runs a tight ship” and “She has a smart way of wearing clothes” allegedly prove a lot about call quality and clarity.
Fortunately for Booze, he can mute the voices at anytime and monitor the status of calls on a laptop that rides shotgun.
To ease the rigors of driving 5,000 miles a month, Booze often kicks back with jazz and gospel music. Smooth crooning helps him handle his hardest assignments, such as when he had to test service during Hurricane Isabelle in 2003 and in the midst of a snowstorm in the Shenandoah Valley three years ago.
As Booze drives around this region in the future, he’ll have to keep an eye on his rear-view mirror; Cunningham said Cingular recently became the first competitor to start a similar program.
