I had to laugh when I saw this tweet from Dave Troy last week:
With the ubiquity of mobile phones and the change they bring to the dialing paradigm, will the generation growing up now only really know about “dial tone” as a historical artifact mentioned in places like Wikipedia?
For those of us who are older, we grew up with idea that you picked up the phone, listened for the dial tone, and THEN dialed your number. But only AFTER you heard the dial tone indicating that everything was working.
Today of course we pull out our mobile phone, enter a number or choose it from our address book – and then hit the “send” or “call” button (or whatever icon is on your phone, usually a green one). We don’t “listen for a dial tone”… because there isn’t one! Similarly, on the SIP phone on my desk that is connected into our corporate IP-PBX, I enter the phone number I’m calling and press the “Dial” button.
Again, no “dial tone”.
Amazing times we live in…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
I like that we still use the word “dial”. You press the “Dial button” on your desk phone.
Daddy… what’s a “dial”?
I recently got “where is the CALL button” after the little one dialed on the POTS line.
From a professional standpoint, though, it is nothing but frustrating when people mumble confused phrases such as “we cannot change the user experience because people will be confused” yet everyone has coped with the change from rotary to buttons, and from dialtone to pressing CALL. (and, in the United States, from exchanges that used letters to exchanges that only use numbers.)
What next, nobody has used a touchscreen so we can’t introduce a touchscreen for fear of changing the user experience? *eyeroll*
Vicki,
Yes, I was going to point out the irony of that, too, but felt it would distract from the main point of the post (so thanks for doing it for me!). The other irony is that on my particular IP phone, it’s a “soft label”, i.e. the button is below the LCD screen and the “label” appears on the LCD display, so the programmer of the software *chose* to use the label “Dial”. Perhaps we’ll see that move to “Call” in the years ahead.
Thanks for the comment,
Dan
Ha! I haven’t heard that yet myself, but I could totally see it! The call initiation paradigm has indeed changed.
Yes, I completely understand your frustration!
I’ve heard that one way too often myself. Not only did users deal with moving to rotary, and moving to the mobile phone “send” paradigm, they dealt with moving to Skype, switching from voice to SMS for much of their communication, etc…
I particularly hear this one around “can’t move to dial by URL”. Yes, we can’t ditch phone numbers, I agree. That doesn’t mean people can’t dial by URL. They dial by Skype user name all the time.