I got a call from our mortgage company the other day. Turns out it was a
>false alarm (payment wasn't due for another 13 days when they called).
>The guy who called me wanted to verify my work phone number. He grouped
>the 10 digits into 5 groups of 2 reading as "Fifty-one, twenty-four,
>twenty-five, etc." That was really hard to follow.
I'll bet he was calling from the UK or one of the former British colonies. For a while we were getting lots of credit card company calls from Ireland and Scotland. That's a common way of writing numbers in the UK, but absolutely horrible from a human factors standpoint.
It never ceases to amaze me how much solid reseach from Bell Labs on human factors is routinely ignored...