austin

austin_walker

@austin

here comes the boy

writer | storyteller | podcaster | ???

log inask
austin
@austin
Willow
@Willow
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

got a comment on a video saying that I had pulse dialing backwards; that to dial a 9, a rotary phone sends a single pulse, while dialing a 1 sends 9 pulses, because the order of the digits on the dial determines how far it rotates, and the 1 is furthest from the stop.

naturally i respond and politely say "that's not right, only the 0 is mismatched because you can't express 0 in a finite number of pulses. the rest are straightforward, a 1 sends 1 pulse."

but as i'm typing this, he leaves the same comment in response to another comment (common older guy on youtube behavior) but expands on it, says he remembers doing this as a kid, dialing with the hookswitch for a laugh but having to tens-complement every digit, ah the memories, etc. And this is so detailed that I'm going "this can't be made up, who would make that up."

i've seen american rotary phones, i've seen british rotary phones, i've seen german and swedish and i think japanese rotary phones

a picture of a rotary phone with a dial that begins at 9 closest to the stop, advances to 1, and ends with 0, instead of the reversed order typical in most places

but i had never seen a new zealand rotary phone, where the 9 is indeed the closest digit to the stop. i have no idea how this happened or when or why, and I also don't know why it ostensibly also happened in Norway, but only Oslo and nowhere else. the story I found online explaining it makes no sense.

however, this is why the emergency number in NZ is not 999 like in the UK, but 111: they explicitly chose to invert it because the entire point of 999 is that it's very hard to dial by accident. in NZ however, you can dial 999 accidentally by simply jiggling the handset on the hook, or wiggling a wire with a short in it. 111, on the other hand, requires three lengthy trips to the end of the dial.

what in the hell

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

my take on it is that they look at the Absolute State of youtube comments and go "well obviously nobody's going to see my post, and why would i be posting if i didn't want it seen? if i reply to like 3 different people, that's like walking up to three different people at a party and inviting them to a conversation until one joins in." and they're completely right, the only reason most people don't do this is because we've been conditioned to treat most posts on the internet as shouting into a void

login to reply
enderlord99
@enderlord99

As someone who does that (among other "old person" habits like "closing tabs when I'm done with them") I can confirm that's pretty much the reasoning, yeah. Now that it has been explicitly pointed out to me as not something everyone does, I suspect it may be generally considered offensive; is it? I hope not.

login to reply
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

I doubt anyone would read it as offensive; it might make you look like you don't know "how things are done around here" (a silly thing for anyone to think on the internet, of course) and I think some people might find it irritating because they don't want to have the same conversation start multiple times.

This is an old complaint from web forums, where people want each thread to be the sole authoritative discussion on a given subject. Of course, when your message is going to be lost in a sea of completely unsorted and unstructured comments, then that complaint doesn't hold any water, so go nuts IMO.

login to reply
lunarfox22
@lunarfox22

Routinely Chuffed by the fact that a good amount of the internet is full of people "correcting" people by just assuming shit they remember from their particular childhood is true and universal for everyone. NZ guy saw no reason why his childhood memories might not apply to what a guy who worked on the NA telephone system is saying.

Americans do this too its a behavior that knows no age or nationality. It's a scourge.

login to reply