Google Blog Finding

“Dad, why do you have two phones?” asked the 11-year-old. While that’s excessive,
it’s dwarfed by the number of
numbers I’m juggling.
And one of them is in
Clatskanie,
and I had to write about ’em so I could drop that
name. Clatskanie, my fingers just love typing it.

Actual Phones

At home, there’s the home number [1] upstairs (stable for 13 years, wow) and
then there’s the number [2] for the office downstairs, more used by
Lauren than me. Lauren has hooked both
of ’em up to some alternate long-distance service which makes calling anywhere
really cheap. I seem to think that’s via her bank of all things.

Then I have my main cellphone, a 604-Vancouver number [3] I’ve
had for a while, and which I
used for the first few months at Google, until I got tired of getting stung
with $400 phone bills for data and voice roaming. It’s a Nexus One “A” model
which works with AT&T in the US and Rogers here; I made a special request
to get it, because Rogers is the only network with decent coverage in
my neighborhood.

The other phone is a “T” model (T-Mobile friendly) Nexus One with the SIM card Google
issued me when I brought up the roaming charges; that’s a 650-Mountain View number. [4]

Oh, and there’s another
painfuly-installed
604-Vancouver land-line number [5] in my
virtual “home office” — I call it
virtual because since Lauren uses the real one, I rent a little room over a
bakery not far from home. I have an ADSL connection on that but haven’t used
the voice capability in months because I have the wrong kind of POTS
splitter. I should get around to fixing that because land-lines have their advantages.

Imaginary Phones

We live increasingly in the era of virtual telephony, and my employer’s in
the biz. I already had a
Google Voice 312-Chicago number
[6] which is a neat trick for a Canadian because they want an actual US
phone number to route to; I solved that for a while by using the 877-
number that Sun gave me, then signed up with Gizmo5, a real interesting
SIP-phone provider and now Google has bought ’em;
it was a 747- number [7], which is interesting as it’s used both for SIP and around
the San Fernando Valley, which is to say LA.
I could get calls in my browser or even a modified
Sipdroid on my Android phone. Well, sort
of.

Since I joined Google I got another Google Voice number and was wondering
what area code to go for; I decided to pick something roughly halfway between
Vancouver and the Googleplex, and while looking through the options stumbled
across that 503-Clatskanie number [8] and couldn’t say no. That’s the
number that I give out and will go on the next revision of my business cards.

I use Google Voice a lot; I route it to the Mountain View number
but mostly make and receive calls on my computer, so I don’t have to hold a
piece of plastic up against my head. For
numbers in the States, GVoice is reliable and robust and free. When it
starts allowing routing calls to Canada, I can give up one of the phones.

The Future

I suspect I’ll want to have two different numbers for the foreseeable
future, so that I can give them out to two sets of people. But I’m pretty
sure that they’ll both route to whatever computer I’m in front of, and to a
single pocket device. And I think that at that point the voice problem will
have been well and truly solved.