[OT] HA HA HA HA

[Mike Labosh]

Know how international phone numbers can be like 10 or 12 digits long
depending on the combinations of prefixes?

I stumbled upon this gem in our database today:

PhoneNumber = "(Int64) 47183538346736"

Apparently, some dummy did a C#-style typecast incorrectly so that the
typecast operator got saved as part of the SQL Server NVARCHAR(30) column.

<bonking head on desk>

I bet the autodialers will choke on it.

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Your autodialers? Not for automated messages I hope.

I get this automated message dialing my work number every so often, some
woman saying "So hi, this is Kate, and I spoke to you last week about a
cable offer..."

If that's the case, let them choke =)

 

[Mike Labosh]

Your autodialers? Not for automated messages I hope.


Heh. My phone number is one digit different from a Deli down the street.
My answering machine gets about 50 calls a day from people ordering
sandwiches.

I get this automated message dialing my work number every so often,
some woman saying "So hi, this is Kate, and I spoke to you last week about
a cable offer..."

If that's the case, let them choke =)

No no, relax. Our company doesn't do any telemarketing. They call CEOs and
IT Managers that have recently bought IBM "big iron", to do a customer
service satisfaction poll.

If you want, I'll search for your name in our database and manually remove
it

 

[Mythran]

If you want, I'll search for your name in our database and manually remove
it

You mean you'll search google for his name/phone number and add it to the
database?

Mythran

 

[Chris Dunaway]

Most auto dialers I have seen would ignore the Int but still dial the
64 and the rest of the digits.

What I can't imagine representing a dial string as a numeric quantity!!
A phone number is a string.

 

[Mike Labosh]

You mean you'll search google for his name/phone number and add it to the

database?

Hehe -- that would be MEAN. I've already searched the database for everyone
in my family to make sure they're *not* in there. But the only people in
our database are IBM Heavy Iron customers.

My mother can't even drive a PC, much less a Z-Series Server hehe

 

[Mike Labosh]

Most auto dialers I have seen would ignore the Int but still dial the

64 and the rest of the digits.

Ours choke on anything that's not a digit. You would not believe all the
bizarre code I had to write to reformat phone numbers.

What I can't imagine representing a dial string as a numeric quantity!!
A phone number is a string.

No kidding. Especially since lots of the international prefixes begin with
zero.

A phone number like this: "004412345678" stored as a numeric would lose the
"00" prefix.

Ditto on ZIP codes. I had to fix a bunch of stuff in one of our Access
Databases because some moron made a ZIPCode column as a Long Integer type,
and so then when users enter data like this: 19021-2060 Access politely
interprets the hyphen as a subtraction operator and stores the result of the
"expression". @#$%^&* And they wonder why I drink & chain-smoke. It's
just so I don't have to murder any developers.

We also occasionally get data files where one of the columns will be filled
with "#ERROR" all the way down -- that's what happens in MS Access when a
data binding gets b0rken.