It happened again. A human error. Imagine you are a customer of Thomas Cook, one of UK’s leading travel company and you call the customer’s hotline for information on a hotel you’ve just booked.  But instead of being transferred to the hotel in question, the operator inadvertently sends you to a whole different type of hotline, this time one of the phone sex numbers couples and singles alike call. You wanted hot, well now you got x-rated hot but that one was a human error chalked up in the funny category.

In the US, believe it or not, Obamacare Enrollees were also accidentally told to call phone sex numbers as well.  Talk about preventative care!  According to a CNS News report, the feds don’t always pay attention when giving people important numbers to call and since 2008, major snafus across the country took place at least 7 times with citizens being giving numbers of phone-sex sites instead!

A year earlier, in 2013, a letter was sent through the mail, you know, that’s the US Post Office by a company asking the readers to contact United Illuminating Co about the Energize Hamden initiative. A phone number was duly listed, only it had a typo error, obviously undetected before the missives were sent out and instead of calling the “illuminated”, folks were in fact calling a chatline and party line line number. I wonder how many new customers the chatline company were able to enlist…

In 2012, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott wanted to give out a state meningitis hotline number to an audience he was addressing, but instead… you guessed it… gave his public the number of a hotline of a different kind. The governor corrected his mistake soon after but not before several people dialed the phone sex number and were greeted by a the voice of a breathy female eager to expand on the virtues of virtual chatting of a different kind.

Mistakes like that happen all the time. In 2010, a Verizon tech support person gave the number of a phonesex chatline to a customer he/she couldn’t help.  The story doesn’t say if the Verizon employee was also moonlighting as a phone sex operator thought.

We’re all looking to save money.  It’s the way of the world, it’s been like that from way back then and it’s a good thing.  It keeps products competitively priced by pitting companies and manufacturers against each other, and it benefits all of us.  But does cheap mean that you’re getting a good deal?  The easy answer to that is… it depends…  When it comes to cheap website design saying that you usually get what you pay for is not entirely true. Web Design pricing is often directly linked to where the design agency has set up shop in, (try and get a quote in Manhattan!), how many people they employ and ultimately, what kind of customers they already service. If your clients are fortune 500 companies then the sky is the limit as to how much you can charge for web design. Does that mean that by paying over the top you are getting more? Absolutely not.

You can get high quality web design for a fraction of the cost companies charge and the difference is not in the design itself, but in how much it has cost you in the first place. Any web developer worth is weight in ink is usually up to standard with all the new technologies (html5 being one of the latest one) as well as the designing fashion of the day.

A few months ago, the hip thing to do was to design a one page website, which consisted of a very long page broken into segments. Whereas in the old days, you might have designed several distinct pages for your website, this new trend means that you group all these pages into one.

Likewise, java-script is back in fashion. The hardcore coders and programmers will tell you that was never out of fashion, but due to the more complex coding procedures, only a handful of developers could boast websites driven in java.  Now, any page you visit has some sort of java script driving it. Flash technologies were in, then they were out…  I personally know of at least two developers who were experts at flash and who have been forced to retrain themselves in html5 in order to adopt and adapt to the trends of day.

At the end of the day, website design is only as good as the amount of traffic that gets to your site, but that is indeed an entirely different kettle of fish.

Less than 15 years ago, if you asked the majority of people out there what website design was, chances are you wouldn’t have found many who could give you a definite answer. After all the internet was still in its infancy and people where getting to grips with the word browsing, and website, let alone what it took to design such a thing.

The other day, we were having Sunday lunch with the family and my grand son asked me point blank who took care of my own website development.  The little fellow is all of 6 years old, is learning to read and write, but web design? That he knew.

I often wonder if people even realize how fast technology has changed our world and what they would do, if for a moment or so, all their electronic gadgets, tablets, smart phones etc fell off the grid. Well, it seems that I am not the only one and this blackout is even the subject of a doomsday tv series “Revolution” in which people try to come to terms with a world without electricity.

It seems that the idea of a world without our beloved e-devices is one that is even preoccupying the military as a weapon that would destroy our ability to communicate could have enough impact that it would send the targeted country back in the dark ages.

Websites have evolved in the past couple of decades, and the languages used to design  them, though a whole lot more complex, are still based on “old” html technologies.  Even in the world of programming, the most sophisticated languages are derived on basic “human” principles and the communicating blocs which drive us all.

It is said that the most complex robot out there cannot yet compete with us and until it does then it is likely that human kind will maintain a controlling grip on how programming languages are designed.  Once these robots over take us though, a whole new methodology of how things are designed will inevitably change and the challenge will then be how we, humans, will cope when we lose this control.  They also made a tv series about that!

Who would have thought that the telephone would play such an important role in keeping the romance alive in the lives of so many couples. Couples and singles alike don’t just use their phone to stay connected, but go way beyond what Graham Bell himself might have anticipated.  They use their phone for romance, so that they may declare their love for one another, have intimate conversations and even sex. This is the case not only for couples who are already in relationships but for singles as well seeking to fill in a void in their intimate lives and this behavior has lead to a flourishing industry where cheap phone sex has reigned supreme for several decades now.

What can you talk about during these conversations largely depends on what you are comfortable with and couples often times will have to go through “a training” period during which they will learn that it is ok to talk about private issues.  Surprisingly the anonymity that the telephone provides often times helps in breaking down barriers that people erect around themselves and the more you talk about “it” the more comfortable you become in revealing that more secret side of yourself to your partner.

Calling a professional phone sex company, whilst removing the romantic aspect of the whole experience ensures that if a person is shy, a more experienced operator will be able to bridge that distance that a person usually surrounds herself with and help bring out his or her true self.

And if you thought that only desperate people (cheats or even perverts) call these kinds of lines, then you’d be a long way from the truth. Political figures, even heads of states have been known to do just that on a regular basis.

Whatever your thoughts on the subject might be, the telephone is yet again proof that sometimes even the oldest technologies continue to play a determining role in our daily lives. Next time you pick up your own phone to dial someone, think about all the many lives throughout the world that have come to rely on this invention and what society would be like if it in fact it never existed in the first place.

When the great Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he probably knew that his invention had the potential to move society to the future.  Whether the great man himself anticipated that the telephone would revolutionize the world in ways that would be so far reaching that it would still play a predominant role in how most the world conducts itself, nearly 85 years later is of course another matter.

It is fair to say that we use our phone for nearly everything we do in life, and though the technology may have evolved, and landlines may have been pushed back to the confines of our ever adaptive memories, not much else has changed in our world today.

Technology companies (including telephone companies) are traded on NASDAQ and every major trading floor in world capitals and if by any nightmarish scenario, phone lines were to become dead, it is fair to say that the world itself would be facing chaos, the likes of which even the more hardened optimists out there would have nightmare about.

Simply put, we cannot possibly envisage a world without our phones, smart or not.

A lot of things have evolved since that day when we began to dial numbers into a device to connect with someone on the other side of town.  In the past few years, technology has evolved by leaps and bounds, like the online world for example. Nowadays we still use the phone to connect with one another, but in addition to landlines, and cell phone signals, we also use the internet as an enormous hub to speak, spread the word, expand our horizons, buy, sell, even have virtual relationship with people half a world away. It may be called voice over ip, and it may even also add the ability to see each other when we “skype” but when it comes down to it, it’s still very much a phone application, that you can use… yes, you guessed it, from your smartphone.

Whatever Mr. Bell may have thought would happen, I bet he wouldn’t have had a clue that phone sex would become as popular as it has become. Married couples and  single alike use this method to form, maintain and even consolidate their relationship with one another. Irrespective of your views on this matter, the fact that it has become so commonly used in this particular context is a testament to the extraordinary contribution the telephone is making in today’s society.