Ten Digit Dialing and a Waste of Paper
August 8th, 2008, 8 Comments »
Did you get one of these? It’s a flyer, included with your phone bill explaining that, as of September 8, the rest of BC (and Alberta) is switching to ten digit dialing:
This was actually news to me–I thought the whole province had already made the move. Apparently not. That’s kind of amusing, actually, because I’ve been dialing ten digits in Victoria since I got there. I guess I could have enjoyed a final six months of seven digits. Think of the energy I could have saved.
In any case, I thought it was odd and a little wasteful that they send these to every phone bill recipient in the province. Surely the vast majority of people living in the Lower Mainland, already accustomed to the ten numbers, would:
- Out of habit, dial ten numbers, wherever they happened to be in the province.
- Learn about the change through other means. I imagine the (worryingly named) Telecommunications Alliance is saturating marketing channels with the news
There’s about 4.1 million people living in the province, and 2.5 million of them are already dialing ten digits. Did the aforementioned Alliance really need to send printed matter to the latter group? Assuming 2.3 people per household, and that most of them have phones and still received paper bills, that’s probably a million pieces of paper, isn’t it? That’s not to mention the resources required to assemble, print and distribute just that one piece of mail.
I guess I’m being rather whingy, but it seemed like a small (or not so small) example of needless waste.