Things that drive me nuts #1: People who fail at MSISDN
This will sound like a stupid whine, and maybe it is, but this drives me absolutely nuts:
Back in the dawn of the GSM age, a bunch of wise men defined a standard with which to write telephone numbers in a universally portable way and named it MSISDN, commonly understood to mean “Mobile Subscriber Integrated Services Digital Network Number”.
Basically, it is a way of representing a phone number in a global way, which can be dialled directly on any GSM handset, and looks like this:
+35892005566
Breaking that down we get the + to indicate that this is an MSISDN number and then:
- 358 = country code for finland
- 9 = Helsinki
- 2005566 = the number
It’s a great little system, and works everywhere. Well it does until retards like one of my old bosses gets their hands on it, and decides to helpfully embed some useless extra zeroes in it for fuck knows what reason, turning his mobile number from 07928 5550011 into:
+44 (0) 7928 5550011
End result? Much borkedness. This will not work ANYWHERE, as the devices try to add the zero into the number dialled, and obviously get a “Number doesn’t exist” error. God damn idiots.
PS: If you want to see REALLY fucked up numbers, look no further than France. They seem enamored with the concept of sprinkling random punctuation marks all over their phone numbers, viz:
(0033)3.21.32.46.09 (This is a restaurant called Esperanza in Wimereux)
WTF?
