I am updating my business card and looking through the stacks of other cards I collect, I seem to notice a trend. Is it the case that using . as a separator in writing phone numbers is increasingly common (at least in mainstream US business).
I am used to: (345) 555-1212
I am seeing more of: 345.555.1212
kind of like an IP address, but of course not fully resolved.
What style are people using these days?
I’ve seen that all over the place. I’m sure it’s just a style influenced by Teh Intarwebs.
The official Bell way of writing North American phone numbers, that we learned in electronics school, was (xxx) xxx-xxxx. The brackets indicated that something was optional. The optional part just happens to be the area code. With the arrival of ten-digit dialling in my area, Bell now writes xxx xxx-xxxx with no brackets.
Me, I write my phone numbers in full international format. I store them in my phone that was as well. A North American number is written internationally like this: +1 xxx xxx xxxx. It’s just a confusing detail that the North American country code, 1, is the same as the North American sent-paid trunk dialling digit.
Graphic designers are always looking for cool new ways to make old boring stuff look different. This is just the design trick of the moment.
Not really of the moment. I’m sure we’ve done a thread like this every year for the past several years.
Come to Korea. For cell phone numbers, the digits are separated by dashes and most cell phone numbers are 11 digits total:
010-5555-5555
For regular phones, the area code is set off with just a close parentheses and the phone numbers total 10 digits:
I’m from Massachusetts. Trends reach us about 5 years after the rest of the world. Heck, around here one could probably find business cards with the local exchange still written out as words: WY man, SK yline, ME rcury, and so on. . .
That’s what I was gonna say. It just has a new clean crisp look to it.
Not at all. It just plain looks stupid. Shows that the business is more interested in looking ‘trendy’ than in accurately and clearly giving the information. (Which sure does NOT encourage me to get into a business relationship with that company.)
Reminds me of the 1970’s trend by designers and advertising people to produce text in one of the silly fonts that had letters imitating the style of the MICR banking digits. Very hard to read, and basically a fake (MICR has no letters, only digits), but it looked very ‘computery’ to a technology-illiterate ad writer.
That’s done here in Jersey, but it’s mostly due to the fact we all have to do 10 digit dialing.
Although, it certainly doesn’t stop the damn pine dwellers from always giving only the last 7 digits. “And the area code?” “Oh, right, it’s 609.” It should be noted it’s been the better part of a decade that we’ve done 10 digit dialing.
It’s been a good twenty years since the local part of my parents number had two digits added to it, yet my mother still gives the four-digit version. And wonders why not everyone automatically knows what digits to magically add to make it work.
It was really fun in Germany (and a lot of Europe), where there are no set number of digits for a phone number. When I lived there, my home phone was (0)6301 7X XX 50 (11 digits, 4 digit area code with leading 0 for inside Germany). My cell phone number was (0)160 97 XX X8 67 (12 digits, 3 digit area code, leading zero for inside Germany) (Xs there to avoid anyone calling the current resident of my house, or whoever got the number later). Of course, country code 49. I saw some numbers as short as 7 digits (including the leading 0). Crazy!
I use the . seperators and have for ages . For one, it’s easier that typing in two entries (), especially when entering business cards on my pda. Second, many parts of the work (0) denotes dialing from inside of a country as opposed to an international call. I guess in the US when the US and Canada both share the same country code, this was not a concern for 99.9% of the population.
Yes, my parents do this too. It used to be “Villagename 123”, and now it’s “012345 654 123” but they still say “Villagename 123, jjimm’s mum speaking!”. I’m surprised they don’t say “ahoy” too.
Awwww, is it your friend asking if you can come round? 
It was/is made even worse, because she had it wrong in the first place, the code not being actually designated as our town, but 01394=394=FXI=Felixstowe, about fifteen miles away.
I always give my area code, and most of the time it seems that the person listening to me loses patience, like, “uh, duh… get to the number, please.”
I’m not sure what our dialing rules are – 10 or 7 digits, but on a cell phone, dialing 10 digitals always works. I seem to recall that back when I had a land line, I sometimes dialing 1+10 digits didn’t work, and 10 digits alone never worked. It always irks me when people begin their telephone numbers 1-xxx when writing or speaking.
One advantage of using the standard international format (+1 800 555 1212) is that it will work anywhere. You don’t have to reprogram the numbers in your cell phone’s phone book when you travel to another country.
ITU-T Recommendation E.123 (Notation for national and international telephone numbers)
Yep, for this reason I always enter numbers +44… (or +1, +353 or whatever). This also (mostly) ensures that caller ID works from foreign numbers.
I don’t use the dots to be trendy or look cool, I use them because it’s about 20 times faster to type a phone number in all with my right hand on the number pad. I still suck at typing numbers from the top row over the main part of the keyboard, so that’s hunt-n-peck, not to mention the Shift-9 Shift-0 thing required for the parentheses and the space bar for the spaces. With dots (I hesitate to call them “periods”, 'cause they’re not serving that function, nor are they decimal points.), it’s all one hand, in a space I don’t need to move my hand or wrist to reach everything, in a pattern I can touch-type.
When I enter my phone number into a webform, I don’t even add the dots. It’s just 3124567890, which most forms read just fine.
I work for a university and all of our public information has to go through one department for review so that it meets internal requirements. Anywho. I did a pamphlet for our program, delivered for review, came back with edits, and I was surprised at one of the changes…the phone number.
For example, I wrote:
(123) 555-2222
Editor scratched and wrote me back to change to:
123/555-2222
I was surprised since I have always been used to (###) and even our university business cards use (###) convention.
Go figure.
I usually just write the numbers: 5555555555. I also give out numbers 5555555, area code 555.