Calling DNO/ power company types? Complex meter!?

Npower actually contact customers with a details of an appointment asking for them to confirm it, I have just been into their website and cancelled it, again I have tried to explain the circumstances, that they have already told me that a smart meter won’t work due to the location and grouping of the meters, also that access has to be arranged with the housing association as they are in the lift plant room, in a limited number of words because there’s a limit on the length of the message.


I wait with interest to see how long it is before we are asked to confirm another appointment.


 Andy Betteridge

If the meter that MH Restorations is talking about is upgraded to a smart meter the potential new suppliers will probably say that if they take it on it will revert to being a dumb meter.


The only way I can see of moving to a different supplier may be to get the existing removed and a new meter installed by the new supplier, hardly an ideal way of working.


 Andy Betteridge

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.

MHRestorations:

Off the original subject but inability to understand how phone numbers work drives me mad... especially down here in 023 land. People still routinely quote numbers as 02380 xxx xxx or 02392 xxx xxx


It's like they don't care that the area code is 023?!


 

I think that the problem in this area is lack of cohesion. If the code 023 and eight-digit numbers applied to a sizeable contiguous chunk of southern English exchanges it might work better. As it stands we have in the setup just Southampton (first digit 8) and Portsmouth (first digit 9). Calls from one of these cities to the other do not require the 023 code. However calls to these cities from places in between, i.e. Fareham (01329) and Locks Heath (01489) do require the full number with area code, even those these calls involve less distance. This I think adds to the confusion between the code and the actual number.


Things are getting more complicated and irregular in that calling a Bournemouth number now requires the code (01202) to be dialled in all cases, even within Bournemouth, for the reason to make more numbers available, i.e. numbers can now start with 0. It seems to me that it will not be long before this change runs out of numbers again and a further change will be necessary. Could not Bournemouth be a candidate for a 023 code, thereby making available as many landline numbers as it will probably ever need? Can any telephone engineers comment?

One ought to give a number as 023 9255 xxxx in which case it is more obvious that within 023 land, one may start with 80 or 92. I don't know whether there are any 023 81xx xxxx numbers, but there are 023 93xx xxxx ones, presumably because they exhausted the supply of 92 ones.

01234 123 123 with breaks for breath and the other person to note it down, also repeat it at the end of a voice mail message.


Andy Betteridge

Actually folk who babble their contact info into the answering machine are a constant problem, some minutes of random waffle about the matter in hand and then a number rattled off so fast there is no time to write it down. I have no interest in the division between area code, sub area codes and final no. The phone handles that. But leaving  a successive escalation of ever more distressed messages, each demanding an urgent response, but  none of which have any intelligible contact information is depressingly common. That or folk who say 'it's Derek here' or whatever their name is, and not realising this is of marginal use to me. (Parents of scouts going on Easter camps take note) Four digits is too many to write down in the time it takes to say them, and triples are about the upper limit. This is a feature of the speed to writing and the way the mind works. Replay on  the answerphone helps sometimes, but not in every case.

There is a good reason that bank PINs, not meant to be memorable from looking over a shoulder are 4 or more digits, and numbers on the sides of vans that are part of an advert are broken into memorable triples, and in countries with longer phone nos, doubles. To me 02380  123 456 is just about memorable, but only because all phone nos start with a zero or a plus, and the memorable part is 238 123 456, you could do it as 02 38 12 34 56, and if you were in Germany or parts of France, you probably would,

Try a trip to the Isle of Man, standing in the hotel reception looking at the taxi cards on the wall you soon discover that they don't display the area code because they assume everyone knows it and you don't need to use it from local landlines. 


Not much use if you have a English mobile phone in your hand.


Mind you I did have an old phone with a Manx SIM card in at one time due to the excessive roaming charges and the prefix was the area code with a seven instead of one. 


Andy B.

A conversation five minutes ago.


A lady requested smart meters, but she has seperate suppliers for her gas and electric. British Gas say they cannot fit a smart gas meter,  because it won't communicate with her new Npower smart electric meter.


There is an assumption that you will take a dual fuel contract with a single supplier. 


Andy Betteridge