Cockeyed Optimist

I quite often order something over the internet (like, I’m sure, many of you do), and one of the items that I’m frequently asked to provide is my telephone number. I have no objection to supplying this for the most part, but sometimes the target site raises an objection, claiming that what I have entered is not a proper telephone number.

Many of the sites are in the US, and they seem to assume that all their customers are too, so they want the number in the US format, e.g., “1 nnn mmmm pppp” (where the “1″ is the country code for the US); and so the site won’t accept anything else.

Now, in Australia, where I live, the numbers go like this: “pppp qqqq” — for calls within the same area code; or “0r pppp qqqq” — to call other area codes, where “0r” is the area code (there are only a few area codes in Australia, so there is always a leading zero); and for international calls “+61 r pppp qqqq”, where 61 is the country code for Australia — note that the leading zero in the area code gets dropped. (The plus sign, “+”, is an indication that you have also to use a special prefix for international calling — some handsets convert the plus automatically. Very few internet sites recognize the plus, so we soon learn not to try it.)

Other countries have different formats again; my relatives live in Poland, and there the phone numbers are like: “48 aa bbbbbbb”, where “48″ is the country code for Poland, “aa” is the city code, and the remaining seven digits are the actual phone number.

While I’m whingeing about this, I might as well have another moan about US assumptions. My wife edits a small Haiku magazine (see the paper wasp website), and people send orders and contributions in by snail mail sometimes, although email is encouraged. You’d be surprised how many of them send self-addressed envelopes for replies with US postage stamps attached, assuming that a US stamp will be accepted anywhere in the world. Well, it isn’t!

So let me make an appeal to those firms and individuals who want to make sales in countries other than their own — make sure that the format of whatever data you are looking for is flexible enough!

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