Germany annihilated!

Virtually...

Cast your mind back to the turn of the millennium: not Domes or Rivers Of Fire, but Dotcoms.  This was when networks were beginning to be intelligent, but phones were not yet smart, in fact they were super-dumb: if you had a mobile, you could send a text message to someone on the same network.  That was all.  But you probably didn’t have a mobile, because they were expensive to buy and even more expensive to run, and batteries were big and heavy and surprisingly short-lived, like pandas.

The Doorbell Tester was working for a cowboy outfit whose primary business was building high-speed phone networks in Europe and across the Atlantic.  Between testing fixes for the Millennium Bug, he was asked to help out with an application that would let landline customers dial a single national number to connect them to a local branch.  (The example the analysts always used was “1-800-PIZZAS”, which tells you (a) that the cowboys were American and (b) what market they thought they were in.  In fact, as they found out a year or so later, they were in the pouring-dollars-down-holes-in-the-ground market; and when they went bust, they blamed the banks, for lending them the money to do it.  This is absolutely true.)

The “intelligent” part of the application was the way in which it determined the customer’s location, its first act being to look at his area code.  Of course, everyone knows about American area codes: 212 is New York City, 615 is Tennessee, 555 is nowhere but is always used by film and TV when a phone number has to be shown.  Every country, the developers assumed, has a similar list, finite and comparatively stable, and usually shown at the front of the local phone book.  It became the DT’s task, because nobody else had done it, to find those lists and load them into the application database.

It was easier said than done.  There was an Internet, but no Wikipedia; information that might conceivably have any financial value was often available only on a need-to-know basis.  National telephone operators certainly didn’t publish area code lists electronically.  For the UK code list, the DT considered the options of OCR-reading or typing every entry from the hard-copy directory, but eventually borrowed the CD version (expensive, issued quarterly) of said directory from the Switchboard.  For France, he found a bureaucrat’s dream of a website that explained the Departement structure in more detail than anyone could want, and included the list he required.  And for Germany he found a University site that had two web pages with all the area codes: one in alphabetic and the other in numerical order, which saved him the task of sorting them.  Gold-dust.

All went well until User Acceptance Testing, when one of the DT’s colleagues went on a week's joyride round the scruffy ends of several European cities to demonstrate the wonders of being able to order a pizza without having to remember a six- or seven-digit number.  (You would have difficulty not remembering the national ten- or eleven-digit number, the theory went, because it would be heavily advertised.  And it would have to be heavily advertised because the concept of substituting numbers for letters, so common in North America, had never taken off elsewhere.  The ideal customer would be one who, on being kidnapped, transported to a different city, overcoming his captors and hiding in an unoccupied garage, decides to order a pizza before yelling for help.  This happens all the time in America.)

She called him from Hamburg.  “Why can’t we find Dortmund?”

Drat.  It had been the DT’s fear all along that information of uncertain provenance on the web might be unreliable.  He checked the database for the Dortmund code she gave him, and found that, no, it wasn’t there.  Oh well, he thought, this is what UAT is for.  He added Dortmund and its code to the database by hand.  Were any other codes missing, or (holding his breath) wrong?  No, she said, not yet, and they’d done quite a few.  Well, he said, keep looking, and let’s hope there are no more. 

Five minutes later, the phone rang again.  “Dusseldorf.”

Double drat: a pattern.  The DT’s heart sank as he opened the alphabetic list of codes from the German university, and bottomed out as he saw that it went from Cuxhaven to Ebeleben without passing Do(rtmund) and without collecting (nearly) two hundred other Ds.  There was nothing for it but get his colleague to smile sweetly, explain that the test database had been inadvertently loaded with the wrong file, and edge around to inquiring where her German hosts would find the most complete information if they had to. 

She came back to the office laden with biscuits, chocolate, promotional fluffy pen-tops and a CD containing what the Germans assured her was the up-to-date list of area codes.  The DT compared their list with the University’s and confirmed that it was almost 100% accurate, except for the complete absence of anywhere beginning with D.  To this day he puzzles occasionally on why a university, or anyone, would keep a list of anything that omitted just one initial letter.  What use would it be? 

I tell him it’s a homage to James Thurber.