"In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!" -Ron Carlson
I just spent the last hour trying to find the phone number for the Ritz-Carlton in Paris. It's not that I want to stay at the Ritz-Carlton, or visit Paris, or even call the Ritz-Carlton. It's all because of one lousy homework assignment. I'm taking this "Office Systems and Procedures" class, just for filler units and an easy A, which it's been so far. The class is supposedly to teach you how to be an administrative assistant. Anyway, this assignment is to teach you how to record good phone messages. So, I have this paper with five messages on them (who called, what time, why, phone number, etc.) except there's some Vital Piece of InformationTM missing from each of them. It tells you exactly what's wrong though and is pretty simple, like "what is the area code for Shreveport, LA?" Simple. Until the last one. "What is the international directory assistance number to call in order to get the number of the Ritz-Carlton in Paris?" I'd been using the internet for the other questions, so I decided to stay on my lazy butt and use the 'net for this one even though I figured the phone book would be able to help. Except that nothing turned up in a search for "international directory assistance number". Plenty of help for calling a number you already knew, but nothing about finding a number that you didn't know. So I dragged out the phone book. Same info, no help. I've got enough country codes, city codes, and international dialing codes to sink a battleship, but no one Almighty Directory Assistance Code to call to find out the number of this frelling hotel. But then I think, how ridiculous is it to bust my butt trying to find a number in order to find a number, when it'd be a heck of a lot easier to just find the blasted number for the hotel myself. Yes, I know the question was to find the finding number, but if this were real life, wouldn't an executive want its (must be politically correct, after all) admin assistant to just find the number it needed to call in order to reach the hotel directly? It took me about 2 minutes to find the number for the hotel (already had all the dialing codes).
In case you're wondering, it's 011 + 33 + 1 + 43 16 30 30.
