Focus on the pacifics of language

I hate lazy grammar and pronunciation. Words like supposably and prolly/probly irritate me. Or the fifty variations of “judiciary” that I’ve heard. Blah, blah, blah. Today, I found an example I hate more. Since I was tired of getting work calls on my cell phone, I called my voicemail to cut off the call-forwarding.

I journeyed through the automated menu options, finally arriving at the correct choice. It repeated my cell phone as my call-forwarding number. I have some zeros in my number, but saying zero was too hard.

Assuming the number is 321-555-9004, the voice said “three-two-one, five-five-five, nine-Oh-Oh-four”.

“O” is not a number. If I dial “O” on my phone, I’d be dialing the number 6. 321-555-9664 is not 321-555-9004.

It’s an automated system. They put a woman in a recording booth, had her speak these messages and numbers into the microphone, and set the sounds on the phone system computer. At any time in the writing and recording process, did anyone think “Perhaps the script should say ‘zero’ since ‘zero’ is a number and ‘O’ is a letter”? These are the same people who need to be told not to dial all the numbers if they call a bank and the phone number is 1-800-BORROW MONEY.