Yes plenty of times. And I've had to muddle with foreign operators and they've had to deal with my really bad attempts at their languages. At the end of the day

Yes plenty of times. And I've had to muddle with foreign operators and they've had to deal with my really bad attempts at their languages. At the end of the day I'd got where I wanted to go though and had some interesting conversations on the way. Where I want to call is somtimes a shack in the middle of some African state with a 60 year old phone dangling off a rusty, noisy aluminium pair with as many repairs as you can imagine on it (my cousin lives out there). It still works as well as it did 60 years ago for them. One of my parents even had a UK BT area code in their company name. It got changed three times in the 90s. They are stil around. It still works for them. What people are proposing regarding swapping out or augumenting numbers with something else is a wholesale reengineering of all voice communication networks worldwide. I.e breaking everything for convenience. Numbers have been "good enough" for the last 100 years and probably will be "good enough" for the next 100 years. Humans have this strange ability to contract out some of their brainpower so they don't have to think about something or can get around some minor inconvenience. It's almost like a numeric witch hunt in this case. I'm going to call it "there's an app for that syndrome" roughly translated as "automate something simple so I don't have to use another 5 brain cells". And yes I get people phone my line asking for the people who used to live here. But it happens less than I get junk mail through my door.