The Dot Trend



Are you a dot or a dash kind of person when it comes to phone numbers?

Hands down I'm a dot. I've been using a period rather than the standard dash to separate numbers in a phone number for as long as, well a long time. So I found this story amusing: Globalization spreads to punctuation, as dots replace dashes in phone numbers.

I guess Europeans have been using the dot for a long time and it's catching on in the United States as a chic, updated look. For me, it's always been a matter of, well, it's a heck of a lot easier to find the period key than the dash.

I use the period key too many times in a day to count (as in writing this blog entry) and I'm accurate. I can count on one hand the number of times I use a dash, and chances are that I'll hit every key that surrounds the dash (=0p[ and F9 and F10) before hitting it dead on.

So it's confession time. I have to admit that one of my small pet peeves is being required to use a dash to enter a phone number in a web form. I'd rather use a period, or better yet not use any punctuation at all. Can't they just write a few lines of code to parse the numbers?

Anyhoo, the real amusement is that now I'm considered a trendsetter when laziness was my real motivation.

Posted: Tue - July 12, 2005 at 07:13 AM          

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