Now that the cell phone has rendered the public pay phone nearly completely obsolete, fast-thinking entrepeneurs are turning obsolescence into opportunity! These new Messenger Pigeon Service kiosks are popping up all over the place. Simply put a few coins into the slot on the pay phone, and a messenger pigeon is automatically retrieved from the now-hollow interior of the phone and a tiny scroll of paper is dispensed from the coin return slot. Simply write your message on the scroll, attach it to the pigeon’s leg with the small rubber band already on the bird, and fling the pigeon skyward. The birds are trained to fly directly to Reston, Virginia, where the MPS Processing Center is. There, waiting handlers collect the birds as they arrive, pass your messages for routing and sorting, and load the birds into cages to be re-populated inside the empty phones. Your message arrives safe and sound withing 3-5 business days.

If their business model holds water, on the next round of financing the management at MPS plan to introduce voice messaging via pigeon. Instead of writing a message, you speak it into the handset of the payphone, and a tiny digital chip records your message. Place the chip in the delivery tube, strap it to the bird, and voila! Voice message away!

MPS estimates that the pigeon population of most American cities is high enough to provide a nearly inexhaustible supply of birds, even when you factor in the ones who might get lost, blown off course by bad weather, or eaten by coyotes. The initial service will only cover the Atlantic Seabord, but a second processing center in Fresno, California, should be online for West Coast service by 4Q08.