I have a Blackberry. I know a lot of other people who have a Blackberry. I know more people with assorted phones with qwerty keyboards on them. What this means and apparently what advertising/marketing  monkeys have failed to grasp is that a lot of us aren’t looking at standard phone dials anymore.  That means that we don’t have ABC above the number 1 and it makes it hard to decipher alphabetic phone numbers. What that also means is that when somebody asks me to dial 800-CleverNumberThatSpellsTheirName I either have to go to a site like phonespell.org or, more often than not, not call them.

When I was taking marketing classes, the object of advertising was to make people want to use your product or service. This fails in the most astounding way if you make somebody want to use your product but then make it really difficult to get to.  I can’t possibly be the first person to notice this since Blackberrys  have been required equipment for every upper level management wonk for approximately the last 10 years.

I mean, seriously, I understand that numbers are tricky for people to remember but it’s nothing like trying to remember what letters appeared above what numbers on a phone dial and decoding that in your head. I could totally buy into phone “numbers” becoming alphabetic like domain names but since telephone companies have all the innovative capacity of Neanderthals I don’t see that happening any time soon. They still seem to think area code splits are a good idea. I’m hoping Google Voice (and services like it) will change this someday.

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