Dialing like it’s going out of style
I’ve always written phone numbers like “(111) 222-3333″ when I’ve needed to include the area code. Lately though I’ve noticed that you don’t see that format used much these days. Much more common is “111-222-3333″ or variants like “111/222-3333″ or some other choice of separators. Occasionally you’ll see “111.222.3333″ written, which is so close to letting your phone number and IP address be the same.
Of course, I’ve always written “1-800-222-3333″ when including the leading 1 prefix, which really makes the parentheses the freak notation, I suppose.
OK, I guess this really isn’t a new phenomenon, but lately I’ve been reading and writing a lot of phone numbers and this struck me again. It just strikes me as weird, thinking of my way of doing something as being old-fashioned.
[Director's commentary on this post: originally two of the phone number examples were immediately followed by a punctuation mark, but I couldn't figure out where to put the punctuation. Inside the quotes makes it look like part of the number I'm quoting, which is wrong, but outside the quotes doesn't look normal either. So instead, I reworded the sentences so that the phone number wouldn't be followed by punctuation. Go me.]
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