Re: Phone numbers and form fields

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2005/03/04]

From: Darrell Fuhriman
Subject: Re: Phone numbers and form fields
Date: 16:29 on 04 Mar 2005
So, as it happens, I was reading Bill Bryson's, "I'm a Stranger
Here Myself" on the way to work this morning.  His essay "Lost in
Cyberland" was stunningly apropos.

After trying to send a Fax from the US to the UK and having no
luck:

"Three weeks later -- this is true -- we received a phone bill
with $68 in charges for calls to Algiers.  Subsequent inquiries
revealed that the people who had written the software for the fax
program had not considered the possibility of overseas
transmissions.  The program was designed to read seven-digit
phone numbers with three-digit area codes. Confronted with any
other combination of numbers, it went into a sort of
dial-a-bedouin default mode.

"I also discovered that the electronic address book had a similar
aversion to addresses without standard U.S. zip codes, rendering
it all but useless for my purposes, and that the answering
machine function had a habit of coming on in the middle of
conversations.

"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so
leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me
that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do
incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart
people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.  They
are, in short, a dangerously perfect match."


Darrell

Generated at 05:00 on 02 Apr 2005 by mariachi 0.52