Key Pads Foil Clever Marketers

By -
So I was trying to call a business to make sure my bill was correct, and their 800 number had the name of the business as the last four digits. And yet, they didn't provide the actual numbers for people.

Since I just switched to a Blackberry with a non-classic keypad, I had to google to remind myself which letters go with which numbers. If I weren't at a computer, I was going to have to draw a picture of a phone.

Note to companies: It's fine to have easy-to-remember phone numbers, designed with the classic keypad in mind. But your customers shouldn't have to give themselves a headache trying to picture a phone in order to call you.

Comments

  1. bobvis7:44 AM

    When I first read this title, I thought I read "Key Pads Foil Markets". I wonder why I would have had that on my mind...

    I got a Palm Centro just last night (with the corresponding keyboard issue). I hadn't thought of this issue until you just mentioned it. Thanks. I didn't even get to make a telephone call on it yet!

    It has to be even tougher on the Blackberry Pearl users. I think they have letters over their number keys, but they don't correspond to the ones they would need for dialing a phone number.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy4:57 PM

    Bobvis,

    You're right! I didn't even realize I was dialing the wrong number until I went to press the "A" and an asterisk appeared, instead of a number.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:20 AM

    Draw a picture of a phone? Jeez, can't you just do this in your head?

    ReplyDelete
  4. bobvis4:58 PM

    It isn't that you can't do it in your head. It's that it's annoying, and we shell out big bucks for our phones, which a growing number of people are using. The point isn't that this is an insurmountable problem facing the world today. It's just annoying.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more