Remosi’s Rants

It’s a few years down the track and the telco’s for whatever reason can’t make their phone numbers longer without upgrading all the phones. Most new phones sold support longer phone numbers and other nifty new features (like encrypting your phone calls for security), but the telco’s have never bothered turning on the new features. Rumours have it that a few telco’s in Europe are using it, and everyone talks about how asia are doing it because they are running out of phone numbers, but in practise, it’s not happening.

Telco’s have actually found that running out of phone numbers is a good thing for them, they can charge more and justify it. They start off by only allocating phone numbers to phones that are turned on. When you leave your house, you turn off your phone and then the phone number you had is used by someone else. When you come home, you turn your phone back on again and you get a different phone number.

People claim that this is great! Why would anyone ever want to call you? You have a phone so you can talk to businesses, and they all pay extra to get a static phone number. You don’t want the businesses calling you. If they want to talk to you then they can send you a letter and you’ll read it yourself thank you very much. The Telco’s LOVE it because they get to charge businesses an arm and a leg, and “it’s not our fault! We just don’t have enough phone numbers to give everyone!”. Some of the savvy users have got systems set up so you can dial a number and say who you are, and a phone book is updated, you can go and consult the latest phone book to discover if someone is at home and if so what their phone number is. So they can make direct calls. But who would want to talk to someone else? The phone system is there to talk to big companies. People who can afford a static phone number

When asked about this many people are saying

The sky isn’t falling!” Nearly 30% of our phone numbers are unused! We’ve got YEARS of phone numbers left they say. And we’re using them responsibly, by demanding to know why people need so many phone numbers. Sure we charge a bit extra for phone numbers but thats ok, most people don’t need a phone number.

Then, as more people get phones and fax machines so their phone is always online, the telco’s just change your phone number every few days, so that they can make sure that you pay extra for a phone number that doesn’t change. Soon people discover it’s nearly impossible to get a phone number that doesn’t change, and in fact, it’s getting hard to get a phone number at all, even one that does change.

First the people with multiple phone lines start deciding that they will just have one phone number shared between two phone lines. This saves them a barrel of money and they think that they are quite clever. But soon it catches on, and pretty soon people discover that their entire apartment block only has one phone number. “But thats ok! Who would ring me?” they say. “I only have my phone so I can talk to businesses! If you want to talk to me, send me a letter!”.

Telemarketters love this, they know that if they pick up a phone and dial a number, any number at random they have a 1/3 chance of someone at the other end being there. No busy signals, and no worries about people not being home. You ring, they’re there. And some of the Telemarketters are trying to sell illegal things. So people combat this by turning off their phone’s ringger. “Why did we even have a ringer on our phone?” they say. “Why aren’t the phone manufacturers turning off the ringer by default!” the activists cry. “People are getting scammed by the telemarketters! If people only turned on their ringer when they were expecting a call then they wouldn’t get scammed!”, and so slowly, people start turning off their ringers.

A smart company starts up the “Instant Phone Message” service, where you can phone up their company and ask them to leave a message for “John Bloggs”. Then You ring up every so often and ask “Do I have any messages?”. People love it! It’s much faster than sending mail! And great for just short chats. Some places even let you ring up and talk to other people directly on a three way call style system, Some places, like Phone Relay Chat even let multiple people talk together in a conference call. People are amazed at these new companies and how well they are doing. The old timers are saying “I remember the time you could talk(1) to anyone on the phone if you knew their phone number.” and everyone looks at them strangely and says “what’s a phone number?”