Jul 21 2008
One-Plus Paralysis
(I’m ad-free again. That failed experiment yielded exactly $5.92 in a month — hardly worth slowing down my blog and selling my soul. Google will owe me that for the rest of my life because they don’t pay until the balance reaches at least $100. Now my category “I Wasn’t Paid to Write This” won’t become a painful reminder of my dismal ad click numbers.)
I don’t rant much. Here goes.
I pick up our home phone and dial the number for the guy who’s supposed to start pouring our patio on Tuesday. In this ridiculously large metro area, it may or may not be long distance, and I throw caution to the wind and dial without a preceding “one.” Three rings later a recorded voice interrupts and tells me, “We’re sorry, you must first dial a ‘one’,” when placing a long distance call. She finishes with the familiar, “Please hang up and try your call again.”
I pick up my work phone and dial a number, this time with the “one.” As soon as I finish dialing, those three annoying, ascending notes play and a recorded voice interrupts to tell me that it is not neccessary to dial a “one” when calling that number. “Please hang up and try your call again,” she says.
In this age of modern telecommunications, could the phone company not set up a system that 1) can tell me before I’ve waited through three rings that I’ve screwed up, or 2) just ignore the “one” if I don’t need it and patch the call through? How about both?
Would this be difficult? Has nobody ever complained? Maybe it’s time.
Let’s keep millions of land-line users from falling victim to one-plus paralysis. Write to your congressional representative today. In fact, let’s ask the presidential candidates how they feel. With the two of them neck-in-neck in the latest polls, a firm position on this issue might just make the difference.
We have the same problem here. Down the street?…long distance. Across town?…local. Aside from memorizing all the prefixes, how am I supposed to know? The phone system should be smarter then this. I’m just crossing my fingers and waiting for Skylab. Sure it will enslave and murder us…but it won’t make us dial numbers.
We have JUST started mandatory 10-digit dialing round my parts up here. Anything local was just a seven-digit call. Now, ALL calls need all 10 numbers, with the long distance thing adding the extra “1″. There has been some grumbling about the inconvenience of it all, but I have more important things to bitch about. There a big furor when our province introduced a second area code a number of years back, and now we’re gonna have a third pretty soon!
CHAOS!!
But yeah, your phone system should really get their act together so that you can at least dial a number successfully. Double fail totally sucks.
Red Herring alert:
Did you manage to catch Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog over the weekend? It was awesome. The three videos were taken down Sunday at midnight, but they’re still available at iTunes.
Now to go catch up with some more of Regular Life…
Weird. Verizon here doesn’t care if you put in a “1″ or not (unless you have to, then they get testy). I always add a “1″ to numbers I store on the home phone or the cell phone. That way I never get the “Hang up and…..” Perhaps because I use Verizon LD?
Yeah, I hate that too Mark… add me to the list of people that wishes they’d get it right.
I don’t have a land line. My cell phone doesn’t care whether I dial 1 or not. So, I save myself a bit of energy and leave out that key-push. But I do understand your pain. I think this is a good question for the presidential candidates. They’re not saying much that impresses me yet, maybe this will get them going.
I don’t get it. You complain that no one is commenting on your site, and then ignore us when we all come by for a conversation. Simon even brought out the double exclamation points just for you, Mark…but you’re apparently too busy to notice.
Well I noticed, Simon…I noticed.
Thanks Mr. Gren. Sometimes the Moksha part of you does win out.
Funny how I didn’t have the time to comment while on vacation, but being back at work seemed to open up whole reams of it.
Moksha - I’m in a bit of a quandary about that, because that is a huge part of the allure of personal blogging. I write and post these little missives while I’m not on company time. So I try my best not to come out here and start participating in the conversation while on company time. I used to take my laptop into the lounge on my lunch hour and reply to the comments amassed to that point. I don’t do that anymore, either.
But I read and enjoy everybody’s comments.
Then, and this is the part that gets me, I go home and spend a little time with Ben before putting him to bed at about 7:30. Then I have the rest of the night to a) hang out with Shannon, and 2) write whatever I’m putting out here next. In my effort to get more sleep than I have in the past two or three years, I don’t stay up as late any more.
I sometimes get out here and reply, but usually everybody’s finished here until my next post. In fact, right now I took a break from writing my next fiction chapter to do this.
Quit brown-nosing Simon. He’s Canadian, you know.
Simon - Regrettably, although I enjoyed your comment, I did not notice the double exclamation points. Thanks!!
I’ll have to check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along blog.
Pops - Would that we had a choice. Somehow At&T has a stranglehold on our fairy city and we have no choice of land-line provider. The next town over does, however, and I’m jealous of the FIOS internet connections offered by Verizon (and now the fact that they apparently can dial 1+ on every number without any annoying message).
Dave - So I’m guessing you’ll have your letter to your representative posted for us to see?
Eve - I haven’t crossed that line yet. I considered it, but some part of me feels the need for a land-line.
Can I just tell you that we just got rid of our home line? I was so sick of it and we are NEVER on it and the cost every month was unnecessary.
I was just glad to take one thing that completely irritates me off my list!
I totally understand the time constraints. I used to write during down time at work. These days find me working at my rental houses with no access to internet. I use Twitter cuz I can do it from my phone…but real content time is rare. But just because you’re doing better than me in that department doesn’t mean that I’m not going to lob insults at you from the cheap seats…[slacker].
I’ve been bestowing bling on some of my favorite blogs this morning. Please stop by Adams Wife’s and pick up your award. :D
Mark, you may remember this. It is funny how phone companies do this stuff.
In Conway, Arkansas where I once lived, calling someone in the town of Mayflower was a local call (some seven miles to the south of Conway). Vilonia (ten miles east of Conway) and Greenbrier (ten miles north of Conway) were long distance calls.
Here in the Little Rock metro area where I now live, I can call my in-laws in the Bryant/Benton area (about 10 to 15 miles outside downtown Little Rock) and in nearby Saline County, and I do not have to dial a “1″ or the area code. Go figure.
In your situation about dialing the “1,” did you forget to include the area code? With all of the area codes that the Metroplex has, I would not be surprised. How many area codes does the BigD have? Half a dozen?
Oooh Mark, you’re so sexy when your pissy ;-)
The phone system is insane. You would think it would have reached a point by now, technologically, that would be more convenient, not less than it was 10 years ago…
I’m reluctant to give up my landline for a couple reasons, the first being that my mother who does not have a cell phone, would incur charges if she had to call my cell. The other is too long and tedious to get into. But it hurts to shell out nearly $40 a month for something so nearly useless.
The Little Rock metro area (which includes Bryant and Benton, where I reside), is 7- or 10-digit dialing.
If the number you’re dialing is truly long distance, that is, if it must be connected through an IXC (interexchange carrier), then yeah, you’ll have to dial a 1 first, and you’ll be prompted to do so. Otherwise, you can call anywhere in the metro area using 7 or 10 digits, resulting either in no toll or intra-LATA toll (which is more expensive than inter-LATA toll, by the way).
What’s weird about this to me is that a few years ago, there was an NPA split here (a new area code, but not overlapping the existing area code– the area of service was split so that half the area got a new area code and the other half kept the existing one), but no overlay to my knowledge. Typically, 10-digit dialing is implemented only as a result of an overlay (multiple area codes over the same area, such as in densely populated MSA’s like Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago). That means that for whatever reason, the LEC here (AT&T) decided proactively to allow 7- or 10-digit dialing. Pretty progressive for a relatively small population metro… assuming I’m right about there never being an overlay here.