Long Distance Calls: Oh Please.

I feel the urge to rant briefly about something that is ridiculous. Pick up a phone right now and dial a long-distance number, but do not dial "1" or "0" first. What do you hear? Why, you hear a recording that says that you have to dial "1" or "0" first. Now, since you were directly dialing the number, it stands to reason that you are not interested in visiting with an operator... in fact, I doubt most people even know why you would even want to dial zero-plus-area-code (you do it to place collect calls, person-to-person, the sort of call where you need an operator's assistance). People who do need zero-plus dialing know how to do it and aren't likely to forget. It seems to me that if the computer is smart enough to know that you need to dial "1" it could default to that, don't you think? Or how about letting you dial "1" or "0" right there while you're listening to the recording without having to hang up and re-dial the whole number?

And what about local calls that are mistakenly dialed with the "1" prefix? In the area where I live, you now have to dial the area code even for local calls, but if you dial with a "1" you hear a recording that you shouldn't have dialed the "1". Here's your hand slap, the recording implies, now go back and do it right this time you smelly gorilla-fingered cretin. Come on... we can route full-motion video around the world instantaneously using satellites, but we can't build a phone system that can intelligently ignore the digit "1" when it is not needed, even though we know that's the problem and will happily play a recording for the caller to tell them so? It's like there's some passive-aggressive person at the phone company giggling every time someone dials or doesn't dial that one extra digit.

Get real, phone companies. Get rid of the superfluous initial-digit recordings.