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)
August 7, 2010 at 11:01 pm
· Filed under Funny, WTF
Just had a great dinner with my Israeli buddy Ms S and she told me of a word in Hebrew that she claimed was truly untranslatable: STAM, spelt סתם in Hebrew.
My initial reaction was “bullshit, I bet you it’s just another of of these slightly nuanced terms like Lagom in Swedish.
It wasn’t, check out this madness of a definition:“STAM: Adverb. Just, only, merely; mere; undefined, casual; simple, not special”
Whilst some of these at first glance seem related, some are positively contradictory or totally unrelated. This word kicks ass, it’s one of those that’ll make even an experienced foreign speaker cry in confusion for hours – thus I have decided to learn Hebrew.
‘On day nine as crucial votes loomed, delegates were invited to check the electronic balloting device once again.
“This is just to test the system,” the chairman said.
“Here’s a simple question to make sure the buttons are working properly: Is Doha the capital of Qatar? To record Yes, please press button number two.”
Thirty seconds later, once the 150 delegates had reached forward to prod the relevant button and the votes were recorded, two nations, Croatia and Cameroon, had voted No and – perhaps from force of habit long-established in security councils and global gatherings – China abstained.
The Cameroon and Croatian delegations could not or maybe did not want to explain why they appeared to have learnt little about the city in which they had spent the past week.
The Chinese delegation remained inscrutable and said nothing.
Perhaps they thought it might be giving too much away if they stated unequivocally that Doha was the capital of Qatar.
What this identified, I think, is a level of cynicism and mistrust that is new to the convention.’
These guys are just so retarded it almost hurts – an “Intelligent” (seriously, these guys are funny) box with an LED that makes your (digital) CDs sound better. For USD 400. Oh and it needs to be “recharged” (of course) every 100 CDs for another 200 USD. Bargain – like discount homeopathy products!
"Intelligent" Box
“It does give us a viable off-line device to enhance optical discs by means of photon treatment – at a price. Audible results are very good and it is hard to listen to a non- treated disc after listening to an enhanced version of that same disc on any CDP. Once used, always hooked so to speak. With the ease of use the IB offers, the crème de la crème of a CD collection can be enhanced in no time.”
No mention of the fact that this is physically impossible of course.
“Dr” Denk and “Dr” Marja, you guys are my Morons of the Month. Seriously, WTF?
