If you want this guy’s phone number it’s 7000000000
Is Russian number
No I think he was just in a hurry
He just rounded up
Only if his meal was for free
Your flirting became too big to fail or it would crash the economy, genius!
If you owe the waitress $100, you have a problem. If you owe the waitress $10 billion, the waitress has a problem.
Yeah, she might have to … wait tables.
She might have to… wait for it…
Seriously, though. Don’t flirt with your servers. They’re working.
Same with people at the grocery store, the gym, the library, the streets even bars and not just the ones working. People are there for some reason and that reason isn’t to be interrupted by some stranger, really think about just staying home instead, I think we both know that’s what’s best for everyone.
exactly, actually just never approach women ever and stay at home and just sob into your pillow at your meaningless existence.
It’s not women’s job to provide meaning, like some kind of super hero sidekick character !
I just really hate the default kneejerk response that if you’re a man who is talking to a woman in public, that you must be a super creep who wants to tie her up in your basement or something. can’t people just be normal and sociable?
Well I’ve seen that vitriol thrown in enough people’s face that I rather not give anyone the opportunity, and just admitting that is of course an invitation to be insulted by some people.
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sorry I’m not sure what you mean by “that” both times in your post. I mean it doesn’t really affect me. I’m married. But for my son, I mean what do I tell him? “Don’t talk to anyone! They’ll put you on tiktok and call you a creep!”
The following text was written by a machine,
personally I just can’t follow that advice
because I love being a shut in and a coward way too much
so it didn’t take much at all
for the vitriol throwers
to convince me to stay away
Son, listen.
You’re going to hear a lot of noise out there. People will tell you never to talk to strangers, never to approach anyone, never to risk looking awkward. They’ll make it sound like if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time, your life will implode. But I’m telling you right now: that’s not how it works.
Yes, you might get it wrong sometimes. You might come off weird. You might say something you think is charming and realize later it wasn’t. And yeah, rejection stings. But that’s part of being human. That’s part of learning. And more importantly, it’s part of connecting.
Because the truth is, some of the best moments in life, the friends you make, the person you fall in love with, the mentor who changes your path, they all start with someone saying hello. Taking a chance. Risking a little awkwardness for something meaningful.
But there’s a difference between being brave and being careless. So here’s what I want you to remember: Always treat people with respect. Read the room. Pay attention. If someone’s working, tired, or clearly not in the mood, leave them be. That’s not fear, it’s decency. You can be respectful and open-hearted at the same time. You don’t need to be afraid of other people, and you don’t need to be afraid of yourself.
Because you’re going to be awkward sometimes. We all are. But the ones who grow into good men are the ones who learn from it without giving up.
So go ahead. Talk to people. Make friends. Be curious. Be kind. Be bold. And when you fall flat on your face, and you will, I’ll still be proud of you.
Because you tried. And trying matters.
I would probably die of cringe before finishing saying that but I wish you good luck
We should make some places where people go to flirt and meet new people. It isn’t healthy for society as a whole not to have any place where it is appropriate to approach each other. That used to be bars for older generations but that seems to have changed and GenZ also consumes much less alcohol than older generations.
As far as I can tell, all spaces where this could happen require an hourly spend of at least 10$. The few places that don’t, usually have no water, bathroom, heat nor electricity
Oh, I know there are none currently, but that doesn’t mean we as a society can’t decide to have something akin to a community centre where people could meet and do stuff for free. It would also probably boost birth rates while helping people be less lonely and I think it would be more effective than trying to ban birth control and abortion, so it would also make sense for Western nations to fund this if politicians actually cared about these sorts of things
Yes, we have those in Canada, rich people complain about them, they’re not very exciting however, I find, like after school classes … but maybe that’s just me, I prefer things to be more computery
Why did you write your region code? Is that normal? If I was sharing my number with someone local, that’s always going to be my standard 10-digit phone number with the first of those digits being 0. That’s less than one billion…
i am guessing you’re not from the US, and OOP is. in the US, first of all, a billion is 10^9. secondly, phone numbers here are typically 7 digits, with an additional 3 digit area code tied to a geographical region, the first digit of which can’t be a 0.
when i was a kid, before cell phones really took off, it was pretty standard to omit the area code, since we were usually all in the same area code where i lived, but since cell phones have become common, and people are likely to retain their phone numbers when they move, it has become much more typical to include the full ten digits, which would be at least 1.21 billion dollars, by american standards.
US cellphone have area codes? Here they have a three digit code as well but it’s required and not tied to any area, unlike landline
The US did not create new area codes for cell phones. I kinda wonder if it would have ever worked. There are only like 800 of them available to the whole nation. 000-199 are not usable; neither an area code or an exchange can start with a leading 0 or 1. And certain round numbers and easy to remember area codes like 200, 211, 300, 311 etc. are reserved. 411 for example is the infromation service, 911 is the emergency number. Fun fact: cell phones are required to be able to dial 911 even if they don’t have a plan or number associated to them. If you dial 911 from a disconnected cell phone, the system will randomly assign that phone a number with a 911 area code.
Even though you can carry a phone elsewhere with you, they are still “area codes.” If you get a new cell phone, it will be assigned an area code for the area you purchased it in. People have moved around and kept their familiar numbers, which is what this XKCD comic is referring to.
The next three digits are the “exchange,” which once upon a time was also routable. Everyone in the same town or neighborhood might have the same exchange, so at one point you really only had to remember 4 digits for a particular phone number, because you knew what exchange and area they were in. Especially with cell phones it’s pretty much 10 random digits.
here, the area code is ostensibly still tied to a geographic area, and it is optional when dialing a number in the same area code, even for cell phones, i believe. when you get a cell phone number the area code is just the area code where you first got the number. so like i live in a college town, and you can fairly reliably tell where somebody is from based on their phone number.
At least on my part, you guess correctly.
A billion being 109 is, at this point, universal. To my knowledge, only the very old in the UK still hold to the “long billion”.
I find that fascinating, because everywhere I’ve lived (and everywhere I haven’t lived but have had reason to be aware of the phone scheme), mobile phone numbers (which often aren’t formatted in the same way as landline numbers) are 10 digits and start with a leading zero.
Growing up, landlines usually didn’t include area code, and would be 8 digits, starting with a non-zero number. But adding an area code would mean adding 2 digits, the first of which is always 0.
So basically, if I see a phone number without a leading zero, I’m going to be very confused, unless I have reason to believe that it includes country code.
I don’t remember a time when including area codes weren’t standard, especially nowadays where it’s required for any digital services.
The country code is typically handwaved, which is +1 for America.
In the 90s if you share the same area code, you don’t need to enter it. This started to be a problem when phone numbers started to run out especially in metro areas. I remember putting in the area code because you needed the area code to dial in to ISPs when I was using a 56k modem.
When I was growing up we didn’t use the area code, so the phone number I still have burned into my brain despite it not having been active for nearly 20 years was 8 digits, beginning with 3. Area codes, if we had used them, would have added two digits, the first of which is always 0 in Australia.
That’s landlines. Mobile phones were only just starting to become popular when I first moved overseas as a kid. They’re always 10 digits, and always start with 04. In both landlines and mobiles, you drop the leading 0 if you’re going to add the country code.
In Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Austria, mobile phone numbers without a country code have a leading zero. If there’s somewhere that doesn’t do this, I suspect they are an outlier.
wait, does that mean australia only has (at most) 9 area codes, for the whole country? wild.
It’s a sparsely-populated country. We actually only use 4. 02 for NSW and the ACT, 03 for Victoria and Tasmania, 07 for Queensland, and 08 for SA, WA, and the NT.
There are then a further 2 digits (or 1 digit for the most populous areas) used for more fine-grained regions, like 073 for Brisbane and 0747 for Townsville. But at least when I was young, those digits would be part of the phone number you would memorise and type, even for other people in the same subregion. I’m not sure if they were compulsory or not. So my phone number as a child was 3XXX XXXX. If I had been on NSW trying to reach that, it wouldn’t have worked, and I’d have needed to know that it’s 07 3XXX XXXX. And internationally it would be 617 3XXX XXXX.
that is so fascinating. i’ll freely admit that i’ve never had the need or the opportunity to travel abroad, nor to call another country, so this is all completely novel info to me. thanks for sharing.
My family got a brand new Pentium 3 computer that came with Windows ME. Part of the install/setup/onboarding process of this OS was connecting to the internet via its dialup modem. My father’s work was our ISP, it was a local number. We left the area code field blank, put in the 7 digit phone number, and the software wouldn’t accept that. The software required the area code field to be filled in. We filled it in, and it pumped the modem noises through to the speakers, where we heard “doo Daa DEEE It is not necessary to dial the area code for a local call. Please hang up and dial the phone number without the area code.”
ENGINEERING!
Most 10 digit phone numbers dont start with a 0…
In the United States, absolutely none of them do.
They do everywhere I’ve lived. And the leading zero gets dropped off you put the country code in.
