IN THE RUN-UP to Britain鈥檚 national dialling code changes on 16 April, Don Cruickshank, director of Oftel, the regulatory body which approved and masterminded the changes, appeared on TV and made a remarkable pledge.
鈥淥nce we have put the 1 in front of all the present numbers, no one who has such a number will have to change again during their lifetime.鈥
Knowing that even as the director spoke numbers were already running short in several cities, Feedback asked Cruickshank how he could guarantee no code changes for something like seventy years. A month and a couple of reminders later, one of Cruickshank鈥檚 staff replied on his behalf.
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鈥淚f, and when, local areas approach exhaustion, our intention is to have solutions available to customers in the 01 codes for so long as this is possible,鈥 wrote Oftel鈥檚 Alan Pridmore. Industry insiders believe that if this means anything, it very likely means Oftel will abandon the original idea of using the 02 prefix when numbers in crowded cities run short, and instead reallocate spare numbers from thinly populated villages.
This seems like a very good idea. So good, in fact, that it was proposed several years ago as a way of avoiding a national code change. Until now Oftel has rejected the idea. But perhaps now that everyone in the country has suffered the misery and expense of the PhoneDay changes, the time is right to experiment with the scheme that would have inconvenienced only a small fraction of the population in the first place.
BEFORE PhoneDay, Oftel rightly warned businesses to reprogram their fax machines because faxes would not understand the recorded announcements BT now plays to people who dial the old numbers. Over the PhoneDay weekend Feedback tried several times to fax a letter to Oftel, ready for the next working day. But on each occasion the fax mysteriously failed to go through.
A little research revealed that Oftel鈥檚 fax machine was answering incoming calls with a spoken message which apologised to the calling fax machine and explained that the office was closed for the weekend.
THE PRACTICE of shooting birds into jet engines, discussed here on 1 April (the date was coincidental), is in fact well established and has been employed in many other countries besides Australia, including Britain, K. R. Brian writes to tell us.
We are also informed by a friend that the technique has spawned a series of apocryphal tales that surely qualify as another urban myth. Here is the version told about British Rail鈥檚 late and unlamented Advanced Passenger Train.
When the APT was being tested in the late 1970s, the story goes, the engineers decided to investigate how tough the glass in the driver鈥檚 cab should be. They wanted to know what effects a collision with a migrating duck might have on a train travelling at 150 miles per hour. So they hired a dead-bird-firing facility from an aircraft testing site and put a mock-up of the APT cab in the firing line. They set the firing speed to 150 mph and launched the bird.
The result was stunning: the bird went through the windscreen and straight through the metal bulkhead behind it. The dazed engineers began to analyse their data: how thick would the windscreen have to be to withstand this, they wondered. They called in an expert.
The expert took one look at the data and another at the devastated cab and asked what they had used as ammunition.
鈥淭here weren鈥檛 any dead ducks around, so we used a chicken,鈥 came the reply. 鈥淯m 鈥 do you think we should have defrosted it first?鈥
LIFE JUST isn鈥檛 fair. Psychologists have long been aware of the so-called 鈥渉alo鈥 effect whereby physically attractive people are assumed by the rest of us to have countless other good qualities. They are often judged to be morally superior, more generous and better adjusted.
The halo effect can influence job prospects, too. Studies have shown that good-looking people are more likely to be offered a job after their first interview. And as if this weren鈥檛 enough, a study described in the April issue of The Psychologist magazine confirms that physically attractive people have another unfair advantage in life. They are better than the rest of us at coping with lower back pain.
A NEW SERIES of photos on CD-ROM is being advertised by Corel Professional Photos. The photos, which come with the Corel ArtView Screen Saver, can be turned into screen savers or start-up 鈥渨allpaper鈥 for computers. The pictures show clouds, dogs, steam trains, the Alps in spring and, somewhat to Feedback鈥檚 surprise, 鈥渄ecorated pumpkins鈥.
But it was another aspect of Corel鈥檚 advertisement that caught our eye. The photos, it said, are all 鈥渞oyalty-free鈥. For a second the heart leapt at what we hoped would be the start of a new trend. Imagine: royalty-free newspapers, royalty-free television channels, royalty-free postage stamps, royalty-free discussions about architecture 鈥 All of them guaranteed to contain no reference whatsoever to the royal family.
But no such luck. It was the other, financial meaning of the word 鈥渞oyalty鈥 that was intended.
SEVERAL READERS have had a go at the game proposed by Colin Singleton in this column on 25 March. He suggested using a thesaurus to find the shortest possible chain of synonyms that leads to a word with the opposite meaning to the one you start with.
We particularly enjoyed Howie Watkins鈥檚 success with the word 鈥渂lack鈥, using the thesaurus that comes as part of Microsoft Works for Windows: 鈥淏lack 鈥 Ebony 鈥 Midnight 鈥 Night 鈥 Dark 鈥 Dun 鈥 Sallow 鈥 White.鈥
And credit, too, to the industrious John Twin, who found the following quick-fire hits in his thesaurus:
鈥淟augh 鈥 Roar 鈥 Cry.鈥
鈥淚ntellectual 鈥 Abstract 鈥 Obscure 鈥 Dim.鈥
鈥淕reen 鈥 Raw 鈥 Harsh 鈥 Barren.鈥
鈥淪ink 鈥 Immerse 鈥 Dip 鈥 Swim.鈥
鈥淪lim 鈥 Lean 鈥 Muscular 鈥 Burly 鈥 Stout.鈥
But it was Ivan Lowe who found the most relevant sequence for this magazine.
鈥淪cience 鈥 Knowledge 鈥 Information 鈥 Lore 鈥 Myth/Legend.
Perhaps the conflict between science and religion discussed so often in the magazine is an illusory one after all.
OUR CONGRATULATIONS to Ingyard Wilhemsen of Bergen, Norway, who has just opened the world鈥檚 first hospital for people who have nothing wrong with them. Top Sant茅 magazine reports that Wilhemsen鈥檚 hospital for hypochondriacs will attempt to alleviate the very real suffering of people who imagine they have some awful disease, but don鈥檛. Only patients in the best of physical health will be admitted.