There is something about dealing with people that makes businesses go mad with numbers. Don’t get me wrong, in science I know that maths is essential. As my old mate Roger Bacon said back in the thirteenth century ‘He who is ignorant of mathematics cannot know the other sciences and the things of this world.’
Yet those who organize us seem to think numbers aren’t worthwhile unless they are impractically immense. My library card has a 10 digit number. Okay, Swindon’s a thriving place, but I don’t think anyone was envisaging occupancy in the billions.
However I’ve just experienced the most bizarre ‘numbers for the sake of it’ yet. I recently ordered a new computer from Dell, as the old crock I’m typing this on is on its last legs. I noticed that, in the abundant emails I’ve had from them since, there were two different order numbers, both eight digit numbers beginning with 2.
Worried that somehow two computers were winging my way, I contacted Dell. They came back with this reassurance:
_ Dear Mr. Brian Clegg, The order reference number is : 21234567, and the order number is : 27654321, so it’s only one order._ (numbers have been changed to protect the guilty).
That’s okay then. One was the order reference number and the other was the order number.
WHHHHYYYYY????!!!
Does the order reference number just reference the order? Which has its own number.
It feels like the sort of thing a C programmer would do with pointers: one is a pointer to the other.
Hello Bob! Nice to see you again.
(names have been changed to protect the guilty)
Many moons ago when I commenced work with Mumbo Jumbo Insurance, one of their advertising slogans was something like “you are a name not just a policy number”
As if.
First question we would ask a policyholder would be, er, “do you have your policy number?”
Then of course you gets old biddies like Mrs Moira McFruitcake who would phone up with no refence and say things like “I’m the one with the red Fiesta”. Sigh……
Mao Zedong once had the brilliant idea to give all the people just a number and get rid of names.
It didn’t catch on beyond a field experiment.
That must not have made it as far as the brilliant idea that if you kill all the birds so they can’t eat your grain, you will end up with more grain.
But did Chairman Mao suggest having two numbers, one being a reference number for your number?
The glass-half-full part of me wants to believe that the nice man from Dell’s Indian call centre was right when he said that both numbers were for the same order.
The glass-half-empty part says ‘no way, two computers will turn up and it will take weeks to get them to take back the extra one and stop trying to extract cash for it.’
We shall see…
Thank you, Henry. Did I miss much whilst I was away?
Hi Bob, welcome back. You probably didn’t miss much but we all missed you. I trust that you and The Beast are now happily reunited.
In South Africa, we have ID numbers which are also rather impossibly long, but they do have the advantage of being logical.
The first 6 digits are your birthday. The next four digits are specific to you and are probably incremented in the order in which your birth was registered (mine is really “low” and for years I thought that this correlated with the fact that I was born really early in the morning, but that doesn’t really make sense, does it…).
The last 3 digits, and bear in mind that this was dreamt up in a fascist “regime”, correspond to your ethnic background and gender.
Anyway, there is no other reason to mention this other than that sometimes long numbers are more logical and contain more information than numbers that just “increment”.
I think, for example, that all the card numbers from my local library have the same first four digits and we could hypothesise that this gives people information regarding which Surrey library will send the bills and collect my fines?
(Of course, you all are very intelligent and have come across these ideas. But, I am in One Of Those Moods.)
Indeed I have, Bronwen (though I can’t claim the ‘very intelligent bit’) – for instance book ISBNs have gone up from 10 to 13 digits, not because there were more than 9,999,999,999 different titles out there, but because vast chunks of the ISBN specify the publisher, provide a check digit (and even identify that it’s a book (duh) in the new version).
However, putting the information in the number is a decision that says it’s more important to make it easy to decode than easy for the user. There are many other ways to do a unique identifier that the system can then allocate to the library (or gender and ethnicity if you are a facist regime) that are much easier for the individual to remember (which is why you don’t get many email addresses that look like a social security number, an ISBN or a Dell order number).
Maybe it’s just easier for computers to convert numbers into 0’s and 1’s than convert letters?
I’m no computer programmer, as all my unhelpful matlab error messages keep telling me, but beep whirrr bzzp bzzp.
General protection fault error.
No, they can’t get away with that one, Michael. As a one-time C programmer, I can assure you there’s no difference between letters and numbers. It’s all ASCII to me.