Subject: Fire!
Dear Sir/Madam,
I’m writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out on the premises. No, that’s too formal…
Dear Sir/Madam,
Fire! Fire! Help me - 123 calendon road.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
All the best, Maurice Moss
I’ll just put this fire with the rest of the fire
Woo that’s a NICE screen saver! It looks so…real…ANYWAY
I love the way the smoke seems to be coming off of the top of it…
🔥<br> 🧯
“Why’s it done that?”
“…ooOOoohhh…”
[bam]
We got a report about a fire
For anyone else who was out of the loop, this is a joke from the IT Crowd when (in the show) England was changing their emergency services numbers:
From today, dialing 999 won’t get you the emergency services. And that’s not the only thing that’s changing. Nicer ambulances, faster response times and better-looking drivers mean they’re not just the emergency services — they’re your emergency services. So, remember the new number: 0118 999 881 999 119 725… 3.
Edit: Edited for clarification that this was a joke in the show and England did not change their emergency services number IRL.
0118 999 881 999 119 752… 3 is the Pastor, not confuse
We never changed emergency numbers. It might have referred to when we changed directory enquiries from a single one operated by your phone provider to multiple options with the prefix 118 xxx. Or perhaps when we extended emergency services to also have non emergency numbers for police and health issues.
Otherwise it’s been 999 for decades (with 112 also routed to the same).
It was the IT crowd, a TV show, not real life
The original comment did read like it was an actual thing happening in England, though
It did, but the numbers never changed.
I’ve lived in England for all of my 36 years and it’s always been 999.
I’m not British, so I don’t know the history of this. The article I took my info specifically said:
Until 2003, you could call directory enquiries (to find out the phone number of someone if you knew their name and address) by dialing 192. That system was privatized, and you had to dial 118 NNN, where the NNN was the number assigned to a commercial service provider, the most famous of which became 118 118.
So the joke in the show was basically, “what if we did to emergency services what we did to directory enquiries”.
Lol yea, I forgot that happened.
Don’t think I’ve ever used directory enquiries in my life. I was 16 in 2003 and we already had the internet at home by then.
How do you know? When is the last time you checked?
You’re right. I’d best give them a call to be on the safe side. Sure they won’t mind if I explain why.
No, really? Wow, this is completely new information!
Are you sure about that. They specifically called out England and not the UK. That is a sure fire way to tell that they know what they’re talking about.
Did you actually mean in real fictional life
Lolol
I’m going to put this meme over here with all the other meme.
Let’s see… the upvote arrow is off, so I turn it on, and just walk away!
BTW you know you can dial it on your phone and have an easter egg? At least on Android
Can confirm, the Easter egg appears when you enter the final “3” into the stock phone app on Android. You do not have to hit “call”.
https://www.androidauthority.com/0118-999-881-999-119-725-3-easter-egg-682519/
That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing.
I just dialed it and it said “the international number you dialed is not available”.
Wow, that phone is ancient, but the episode’s not that old…is it?
Original air date April 9, 1995
Oh.
chuckles I’M OLD!
Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?
The trouble with Arsenal is they try to walk the ball into the net
Is someone crying?
----- three!
I’m disabled!
How, how are you disabled?
Leg disabled
Why did you become disabled?
did you know that if you type this number into the default Android dialer app, the call button will flash red and blue
(does not work on phones that provide their own dialer such as Samsung but nevertheless a cool easter egg)
This is brilliant!
I didn’t believe you until I tried it myself. That’s amazing, thanks for sharing this gem :D
This is so cool lmao
I always liked the 3 at the end, in the song :)
it’s an old one, now… but it never gets old.
it’s an old one, now…
You can tell by the comically-large '90s cellphone!
I’m not a window cleaner!
No, sorry. I really only work on Windows.
Wow! Those are some better-looking drivers! But damn these electric sex pants!
Had to flip my phone to make sure it wasn’t a boobs meme with the calculator
Geek trivia.
It would almost be a valid Wokingham (Berkshire UK) number (well 0118 999 8819 would be) except I think after the second 9 there’s no allocated numbers.
That is, it’s not possible to dial in the UK, you would get an number unobtainable tone as soon as you dial 0118 99 on a landline phone.
Are hyphens not used in UK telephone numbers like they are in the US?
Not really. Some people do, but if you look at printed numbers it’s usually a space. At least from my experience.
Number formatting is a funny thing too. So Wokingham (which is on the Reading 0118 prefix) is 0118 9. But the format is generally written 0118 9xx xxxx and not 01189 xxx xxx. But other area codes are like 01268 xxx xxx. London is especially interesting because people format differently, mostly based on age. See London numbers used to be 01 xxx xxxx. So people wrote their numbers as (01) xxx xxxx (if you lived in London you just dialled the last 7 digits). But over time the London prefixes evolved many times. Now it is 020 for London and xxxx xxxx. But the main first digits often still follow older patters of 7 for inner London and 8 for outer London (for older numbers at least). So older people (and I mean my age, not elderly) often format their number as 0208 xxx xxxx.
Went off on a tangent a bit there. Main story is, in my experience no hyphens is more common. But people do sometimes use them.
I’m okay with tangents because I love learning about formatting & cultural differences. I think it’s fascinating!
And yeah that’s interesting because here in the US, putting a hyphen in between each section is typically much more common. For example, we’d write 123-456-7890.
I think when I was much younger, in the 80s it was more common to use hyphens. But I think this was more when people wrote with a pen on paper.
On shop fronts and when printed, seems quite the rarity here I think.
How do you prevent overflow with line breaks without having to use
every single time, though? With a visible separator, there’d be no need for that.I think the ITU E.123 predates HTML by some years…
I meant currently. Lol.
No hyphens follow some international standards such as those of the ITU. ITU E.123 recommends: ‘only spaces be used to visually separate groups of numbers “unless an agreed upon explicit symbol (e.g. hyphen) is necessary for procedural purposes” in national notation’
