Yes, the distinction is geographic *rate* versus greater than geographic rate. Many companies now have so many different call centres to which a call might be routed that geographically-located numbers (01xxx, 02xxx) are no longer relevant for them. There was a time that you could look at a phone number and be *fairly* confident that you'd be speaking to someone whose accent matched the code. Now you could be speaking to someone based in another country, even though they are representing a supposedly British company.
As Andy says, back in those days there wasn't a simple flat national tariff, there were lots of tariff bands. Originally an 0844 could be down to
0.5p/min, which was sometimes *cheaper* than your telco would charge you for a national call. You still had to pay the 'call setup fee' (a money-for-jam telco invention). The downside was it wasn't in 'free weekends' and similar bundles, so it wasn't always cheaper.
So the fact that a call was revenue-share and whether it was more expensive than 'normal' weren't strongly connected.
Also the confusopoly of 0844 / 0871. There were a million different prefixes and you had to look up that 0871 1234 was 10p/min and 0871 5678 was
6p/min - there was no logic to the link between number and price.
0870 isn't much of a scam these days, because there's no revenue share.
0871 has revenue share. 0870 is mostly a sign that a company was too lazy to update their phone system or website in the past 15 years, so is possibly not a going concern.
I wouldn't say I memorised them, but we used to develop software that needed to lookup phone numbers for least cost routing and billing, if you work with STD and IDD, codes, they do somehow stick ...
I worked with a guy who was a walking lookup table for things like that. He had even memorised exchange groupings so he could say "Ah yes, 0532 is Leeds. And if the subscriber's number starts with 65, it's in Roundhay exchange whereas if it starts with 66 it's in Shadwell exchange" etc (fictitious example). He could also recognise car dashboard instruments: you could show him a speedo and he'd say "Ah yes, a Jaeger XYZ. Used in the Ford Cortina Mark I, in the Ford Corsair GL but not the 2000E which used the Jaeger WXY, and in the Capri when it was calibrated to 100 mph rather than
90 mph" (fictitious example). Likewise for car registrations - he could decode the second and third letters of the old-style number to pre-DVLA local authority level, when UA/UB/UM and NW were Leeds, CX was Huddersfield, HL was Wakefield etc, and he even knew the allocation of the first latter (ANW was Leeds between 1950 and 1951, BNW was Leeds in 1952 etc - in the days before the well-known single-letter suffix A=1963, B=1964 etc. And if you got him started, he could recite more or less the whole script of cult films such as Life of Brian. As I say, a walking lookup table. He was a software developer and it is reputed that he once diagnosed an obscure error in the device driver of a network card, by reverse-engineering the binary, worked out the fault, patched it and got permission from his head of department to offer the fix back to the card manufacturer (who told him to naff off). It was said that you should never ask him a technical question because he would answer it in great detail and then go on to answer all the related questions that you might have asked him on the subject - he didn't understand the concept of a quick question and a quick answer.
I remember in the days when phonebooks had a list of all STD codes at the beginning, I scanned the pages, fed them through OCR and produced a table which I could sort by code to translate STD to town - back in the days before that info was searchable on the web.
Interesting. I would have thought of that level of nerdiness would tend to be someone with a technical numbers-and-programming background rather than a word-based background such a lawyer. But then I suppose anyone who needs to remember a lot of legal cases (lawyer), or a lot of medical symptoms (doctor), or the route between one street and another (London taxi driver) would the sort of brain that would be able to memorise STD codes and car registration letters.
I can remember the registrations of all the cars I've owned, and the STD codes for common exchanges in the area. But only a very small subset of the whole STD list, based on whether I regularly phone someone in that code area.
I've never actually seen a copy, though I heard long after I'd made my own list that the phonebook companion existed. I've no idea how you got a copy. Was it something that GPO/BT would send you on request?
I have resolved the problem. The telephone number belongs to a family friend. It is not listed. It is not normally used by anyone in our family because we normally communicate with the friend concerned by WhatsApp or our cellphones.
It appears that a member of my household suddenly started using the landline and talking for hours. It has the hallmarks of early onset dementia.
I am going to email the other party and warm them not to accept calls from our landline number.
I am still furious with the insurance companies for keeping the rest of us on long expensive calls.
Apologies to everyone who tried to solve this for me.
I'm slightly frustrated by knowing someone who has exactly the same traits of a walking lookup table, but curiously drew the line of getting involved with anything to do with technology. Which I think was a sad miss for him.
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