A H wrote:
All day long the lazy journalists of the UK media have been giving
out the emergency telephone number for the SE Asia earthquake and
subsequent tidal waves in the format:

'0207 008 0000'

BBC News 24, Sky News, Teletext have been displaying and saying it
wrongly all day
ITN News 24 format it correctly on-screen but the presenters have
been saying "0207 008 000" all day long....

Is Oftel/Ofcom to blame for this mass stupidity/ignorance (because
of the way the renumbering was done a few years back) or are people
in this country in general just thick?

Soon we can expect to see/hear '0203 xxx xxxx'

Is this the only country in the world that can't cope with simple
number changes?

It wasn't a simple change, as a digit which was part of the exchange
code was moved into the subscriber's number. It was actually the 4th
number change that London has endured. The original exchange in
Chiswick, for example, CHI (=244) has become in succession 01-994, 081
994, 0181 994, and now 020 8994. The change to a 4-digit exchange code
within London was not publicised clearly enough, and the increasing use
of mobile phones means that in many cases the whole 11 digits are needed
anyway, so the exact position of the spaces becomes irrelevant, as it
also is for mobile phone numbers.

I was pleased to hear Charlotte Green on BBC Radio 4 this evening quote
the number correctly, as I drove back to London (the latter phrase being
a desperate attempt to make this thread on-topic).
--
Richard J.
(to e-mail me, swap uk and yon in address)