dial 10 for murmur

The good folks at Telcel have been repeatedly reminding me that the Mexican telephone system is making a giant leap into modernity on 3 August.

The news is not new. (I suppose that makes it olds.) You read about the pending change here in in with the new, off with the old last month. But Telcel knows its customers. We need to be reminded periodically.

When I moved to Mexico eleven years ago, using the telephone almost required a secondary major in engineering. You needed to know if you were calling someone on their land line or their mobile phone. Then, you had to figure out the options if you were calling from one or the other. That would result in placing different refiexes in front of the telephone number.

It was complex enough that most of us used various cheat sheets simply to make telephone calls. But we just accepted the fact that was the way it was in Mexico.

Dialing has become simpler. But, on 3 August, all of that changes. For the better.

Mexico will be joining the same international telephone regime used by Canada and the United States. If you want to call any telephone in Mexico, you will simply dial the 10-digit telephone number.

Of course, if you are like me and use your smartphone almost solely as a pocket-size computer, the change will really not matter. I suspect I make two or three calls a year on my mobile, and I probably receive less than one a month.

But, for businesses and those individuals who survive on telephones as social media, dialing will be much simpler.

And that deserves three olés for innovation.