Does the title of this article sound ridiculous in this day and age? It should. The situation that lead me to it cerainly was.

At my workplace, we were visited today by a consultant who is helping us with a software product that we are installing. It's entriely new to most of our organization, and so we have brought in outside experise.

At one point, however, our intrepid consultant had a need to place a phone call. Pretty simple, really, just pick up the phone and dial the number, right? Well, there were four of us in the conference room, and he wanted to put the call on speaker. Okay, how do you do that?

The answer, unfortunately, depends on whether your phones were made by Cisco, or Siemens, or Nortel, or Lucent, or . . .

As if that weren't enough, in our case, it also depends on whether you have the basic phone, or the advanced one.

Obviously, I was able to tell him what he needed to do, but he and his colleague were commenting about how it would be nice to have all of that standardized.

Taking it a step further, I have observed, through the various places my career path has taken me, that sometimes the way to make a phone call is not so obvious. In some places, you dial 9 to get an outside line; in others, you might dial 8 or 7. In still others, you might dial 1 or 8 if it is long distance, 9 otherwise. Sometimes there are tie lines involved, and you might dial 7 for that. In one place, you could dial 0 or 9 for a local outside line; 8 for a long distance call in-country, 7 for the tie line, or 6 for calls to a particular other country, where the company is headquartered.

It reminds me of a saying: The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.