Calling DNO/ power company types? Complex meter!?

Sparkingchip:

Parts Worcester still have five digit phone numbers eg 01905 12345


The mother-in-law took a phone contract through the Post Office which includes free local calls, she phoned the customer ream to complain that she was being charged to phone some of her local friends, they said it was because she was dialling a special short code rather than a “proper” phone number, because all phone numbers have six digits. You can imagine how the conversation progressed.


Andy 

I guess the conversation was along the lines of, "I just work here. I'm a civil servant. I must follow procedure." 


Your mother-in-law could try adding a redundant 1 at the end of the number. This would not affect it being connected but could satisfy the accounting. If not she could try to see if she can get a better deal from BT, who understand telephones better than most. I get free calls, too, including to five-digit numbers.


This reminds me of the 1950s, when the  Post Office actually managed the telephone system, when coin box phones usually had six-digit numbers ending with 1, even though there were very few genuine six-digit phone numbers in those days. So a 5-digit number would have one 1 added, and a 4-digit number two 1s. I was never sure of the real reason for this, other than possibly just to identify a coin box phone as such. The extra 1s would have had no part in routing the call through the exchange; it was all electro-mechanical Strowger stuff in those days, which would have been incapable of handling the occasional extra digit. (Any telephone engineers out there who can explain further?)


Subscriber Trunk Dialling was still several years away. When it arrived thousands, if not millions of phones throughout the UK had letters added to their dials to cope with the nice user-friendly dialling codes. Thus Worcester was 0WO5, Gloucester was 0GL2 and so on. Then in the mid-sixties the GPO decided to abandon them in favour of all-figure numbers, so the conversion of the telephone dials was a wasted exercise.


Actually, most of the provincial exchange codes can still be converted back to lettered form. I do it regularly; it helps me to remember codes.

Sparkingchip:

Parts Worcester still have five digit phone numbers eg 01905 12345


The mother-in-law took a phone contract through the Post Office which includes free local calls, she phoned the customer ream to complain that she was being charged to phone some of her local friends, they said it was because she was dialling a special short code rather than a “proper” phone number, because all phone numbers have six digits. You can imagine how the conversation progressed.


Andy 

I guess the conversation was along the lines of, "I just work here. I'm a civil servant. I must follow procedure." 


Your mother-in-law could try adding a redundant 1 at the end of the number. This would not affect it being connected but could satisfy the accounting. If not she could try to see if she can get a better deal from BT, who understand telephones better than most. I get free calls, too, including to five-digit numbers.


This reminds me of the 1950s, when the  Post Office actually managed the telephone system, when coin box phones usually had six-digit numbers ending with 1, even though there were very few genuine six-digit phone numbers in those days. So a 5-digit number would have one 1 added, and a 4-digit number two 1s. I was never sure of the real reason for this, other than possibly just to identify a coin box phone as such. The extra 1s would have had no part in routing the call through the exchange; it was all electro-mechanical Strowger stuff in those days, which would have been incapable of handling the occasional extra digit. (Any telephone engineers out there who can explain further?)


Subscriber Trunk Dialling was still several years away. When it arrived thousands, if not millions of phones throughout the UK had letters added to their dials to cope with the nice user-friendly dialling codes. Thus Worcester was 0WO5, Gloucester was 0GL2 and so on. Then in the mid-sixties the GPO decided to abandon them in favour of all-figure numbers, so the conversion of the telephone dials was a wasted exercise.


Actually, most of the provincial exchange codes can still be converted back to lettered form. I do it regularly; it helps me to remember codes.