A day that I will never forget; Sept. 22, 1996. That was the day I was noodling around on my new Compaq Presario 7100 PC that I purchased at Incredible Universe on NW 25 and the Palmetto just a month before.
I read about something called a website domain and how people were buying them up and trying to sell them for a small fortune. So I said, maybe I should go ahead and see if PleaseHold.com was available. After all, my company is named Please Hold Advertising, what could it hurt. Using Netscape Navigator I went to web.com via my dial-up modem and looked it up. To my amazement, it was available! I suddenly became very nervous and started fumbling around for my credit card in my wallet. Finally, after a few minutes of inputting my information and payment source, I became the registrant of www.pleasehold.com. I knew I had accomplished something special, even in 1996 which was the beginning of large scale adaption of the web or the Internet.
Not two weeks went by, when I started to get hang-up calls from a company called Please Hold Promotions in Tempe, AZ. They would call and hang up, but my trusty caller ID box always let me know they called. After about the 10th time of hanging up on me, someone finally spoke; “Who is this?” the voice on the other line said. “This is Please Hold Advertising in Miami, FL, my name is Carlos, may I help you?”. “I work for Please Hold Promotions in Tempe Arizona. We’ve been in business since 1985 and are a leader in the on-hold message business. We see that you registered our name on the web. We’ve been around a lot longer than your company and we want. you to release the registration to pleasehold.com to us.” I asked him how much were they willing to pay for the name. He said that they would not pay anything and that we would be hearing from their lawyers. I stated to him that we are a legally registered corporati0n in Florida named Please Hold Advertising, Inc. and it is our web name now. Click and dial tone is all I heard. They later called back and told me a story that the person that was assigned to reserve the “web name” as he called it, had left on vacation thinking that they would just take care of it when they got back to the office. By that time. they realized I had beat them to it by just days. They called a few more times and said nasty threatening things, but eventually, the calls stopped.
I did look up Please Hold Promotions on line and did see they were a sizable player at the time. I was just a one-man band with an idea to make great on-hold messages with music. My lawyer at the time, a man named Robert Schimmel, just said if they call you back tell them to call him.
Looking back twenty-four years later, I am glad I trusted my gut and acted quickly to finalize the registration of my domain, www.pleasehold.com. Today, there are several other companies with the word please hold in their name, but there is only one www.pleasehold.com
PS Thank you to Heidi at GoDaddy for telling me that I should write the story of pleasehold.com. She liked the domain when I gave her my email address and that’s how it came about.
Carlos Garcia
President and founder,
Please Hold Advertising, Inc.