What kind of grab-ass cellphone company do you work for? I’ve had T-Mobile for 8 years and none of my phones have cared if there’s a 1 before the area code or not.
You’re right; 1 is the sent-paid trunk dialling digit. (And 0 is the non-sent-paid trunk dialling digit, for when you want to call collect.)
Or you put the plus sign before the one and acknowledge one in its true majesty as the North American telephonic country code. +1 800 555 1212. 
ahem In electronics school they taught me that brackets surrounded an item that was optional. This, in an area with seven-digit dialling, you’d write (555) 555-1212. However, for those of us who live in areas with ten-digit dialling, we write 555-555-1212. Because we no longer have a choice; we must dial the area code.
And if you’re in an area of the NANP where the dialling plan demands 1 before an area code, and you have ten-digit dialling, you’re more-or-less forced to dial it before every landline call. 1-555-555-1212.
In print, it depends on the house style of the publisher. I’m coauthor of a math textbook. In one edition, the copyeditor insisted on taking the commas out of all 4-digit numbers. In the next edition, a different copyeditor put them all back in.
Uh, a big one.
It’s not that we care, it’s that some messaging equipment (the newer stuff, I believe) doesn’t support the 1. It’s geographically-tied – some places it’ll work, some it won’t. I’ve been told the “won’t” areas will be growing over the years. Best practices right now is to exclude the one from your contacts; it’s never necessary, and will eventually be problematic.
Fair enough. I think the app Bump automatically adds 1s to numbers, FWIW; I never consciously add them.
There are those of us that were born with much poorer than average fine motor control. Just getting things legible takes far more effort for me than for most people.
All the payroll and accounting reports I’ve ever seen use commas. The standard currency formatting in Excel uses $ and commas.
I create a lot of these reports in my job. Crystal reports and spreadsheets. I only use currency formatting on sub totals and report totals. The data in columns use stand comma formatting. 999,999,999.00 and yes 3,000 has a comma in it.
The one thing that isn’t stand is the $. Some people like it next to the number. 12,567.00 and others fixed …12,567.00. I know the preferences of my users and design the report whichever way they want. In a big report with thousand or more lines the fixed $ makes the subtotals stand out better.
The lack of commas in numbers is mainly due to the junior staff being too damn lazy to format their spreadsheets and text documents properly.
Which reminds me, I should get back to work. Now, where’s my whip?
I can’t say I’ve seen them removed from numbers often. Now lists and general usage are another story, and it drives me NUTS. Sorry, not trying to hijack the thread, just felt my teeth grind a little.
By the way, everyone with any interest in this thread needs to read some Lynne Truss. Hilarious, and is ruthless in shredding the awful use of punctuation.
I was taught at one point not to use them for four digit numbers. I decided to forgo this when I started getting numbers confused with years.
I do use the space to the right of the decimal point, if I’m not copying and pasting from a calculator or something.
We in Ontario were taught in school to use spaces instead of commas when writing numbers with metric units. This also is the style on population signs outside towns.
Except there are combinations of languages where the same 3 letter abbreviation can mean two different months.
A company I work for recently got burned by this when they expanded into a new country after standardizing all their dates to 08sep11 format because it was an “international standard.” Luckily I was using ISO 8601 internally (2011-09-08) and was only displaying in their 08sep11 format so I just had to change the date display method in one place to fix it.
“Lazy programmers”? You mean nearly all programmers? Have you meet many of us?
Dealing with commas in user input is a pain. And it’s not just a question of stripping them out. What if the user types in “3,00” is that 300 or a typo? And do you really want to spend a half hour in a team meeting discussing if “,100” is an error or not and whether it should be flagged, etc.? Commas just create a whole bunch of extra error conditions to deal with which are a pain.
So computer programmers hate, hate, hate commas. So users are routinely told to type in numbers without them. So people get used to not using them. Which leads to them becoming less common elsewhere.
Here is an example right here in our own message board.
Confusing to me.
Nah, old school would be (800) KLondike5-1212
Actually, if we go old school enough we’d just ask Central to get the other party, dadgumit.