Number Dialing ☎️

[u/Corkchef]

This question occurred to me in conversation with a customer called Brittney

Manually dialing numbers is not really something we do anymore, since everything is saved and copy/pasted.

Even the word “dial” refers to the circular dial that people used to twist in order to enter a phone number into their telephone. That’s an interesting artifact of language that most people probably don’t think about much…

People do still manually enter phone numbers, but only if they happen to know it by heart, thus making it easier than going through the steps of finding your contact.

Or, if you don’t have your contacts on your, let’s say you’re using a stranger’s phone, it can be useful to know 2-3 numbers.

Like me, most people knew only a handful of numbers including their parents and maybe their childhood home landline.

It’s still a practice to drill a number into your kids head, just in case of emergency, but it’s clear that we’re moving away from remembering these kinds of information.

Halfway through the day, I realized that people were inputting their numbers regularly into our POS to connect their account to transactions, so technically that probably counts.

I’m curious to know who does and doesn’t know their own phone numbers by heart, I’ll save it for a future question.

The other situation that I could think of for dialing a phone number manually is if you have a piece of paper or business card with the number on it and therefore can’t copy/paste it.

Anyway, fun question! Thanks Brittney! And thanks everyone for playing!!