I’ve already blogged about how hard it is these days to make a phone call in Nova Scotia*. And as if that rant wasn’t bad enough, I’ve since thought of even more things to complain about.
(In case you need a primer: use 10-digit dialing for local calls, 11 digits (including “1”) for long distance calls, and 12-digits (including “9 to get out”) when you need an outside line from the office, except of course only 11 digits from the office for local calls (including the “9” but not the “1”) or when calling from the office using a smartphone, which used to be able to figure it all out from 7 digits but now needs 10 or 11 but never 12. See? Simple.)
But let’s try to stay positive here, and come up with a few constructive suggestions. One would be to go back to the old way of defaulting to 902 if the area code wasn’t specifically dialed, given that 99.9% of phones in Nova Scotia use that area code and that percentage isn’t likely to drop too fast too soon. The other thing is to stop asking us to dial 1 for long distance, and just tell us if long-distance charges will apply, at which point and we can just hang up if we so desire.
Now I am presuming the engineers at the phone companies already thought of these things, and for some reason beyond my non-engineering level of comprehension, things just can’t work that way. So now I am left with only one thing: change it so it at least seems to make sense.
I think that’s what they do in Europe. All phone numbers there have at least ten digits, and if you pay attention, the first few ones are usually clues as to the location you are calling. People there don’t seem to mind.
So how do we do this in Nova Scotia? Simple: change the rhythm of the phone numbers. Don’t pause at 902; pause somewhere else, say after the fifth digit. That way, it’ll sound like we’re in some large exotic province, and we’ll all feel better.
If you’d like more on this, feel free to give me a call, at 90245 45656.
Has a nice ring to it, what?
_______
(* See: http://blog.nicomit.com/index.php/2014/12/phones-smart-except-for-making-calls).
