Story time!

I used to be a truck driver. When returning across the border (am Canadian) I’d have to fax my paperwork to the customs broker to get my load cleared through customs. So I’d usually write down the phone and fax numbers to give to the person at the truck stop to fax it but obviously I’m lazy so I’d use the ditto marks to denote that only part of the number was different. Prefix numbers for one companies phone and fax are usually the same. So anywho, I hand it to the girl at a truck stop in Texas and she goes off and comes back and says it didn’t go through. I asked her to try again, she tries again and nothing. Then she says, “it’s probably because there aren’t enough numbers. The first four are just ones.” It took me a moment to wrap my head around the idea that she tried it twice without asking me if something was wrong with what I wrote down. Didn’t clarify, didn’t consider that those weren’t actually numbers, just went ahead and tried anyway. I wonder if she still works there.