I was following a tradie down Moorhouse Ave yesterday and almost drove off the road. I was so annoyed by the way he had asked his sign writer to format his phone number:
03 3777 739
Which is technically correct.
And spiritually catastrophic.
There is no legislation governing the matter.
No ISO standard.
No enforcement mechanism.
But every right-thinking Kiwi knows a Christchurch phone number should be written:
03 377 7739
Any other format feels deeply, metaphysically wrong.
This becomes even more obvious when Australian software migrates quietly across the Tasman.
Every so often you encounter a form asking for a bank account number in a format that feels subtly hostile to human life.
The digits are familiar.
The intent is understandable.
And yet the spacing is somehow wrong in a way that immediately causes every New Zealander in the room to look at each other with the same haunted expression usually associated with discovering a wet sock.
Because New Zealanders do not merely know numbers.
We know how numbers are supposed to feel.
Phone numbers have rhythm.
Bank account numbers have cadence.
Dates have shape.
And when somebody gets these invisible conventions wrong, it produces the same emotional discomfort as somebody clapping on beats one and three.
None of this is rational.
A phone number grouped incorrectly still functions perfectly well.
In fact, none of these conventions are inherently correct.
And yet familiarity quietly transforms itself into righteousness.
We absorb a particular rhythm through repetition, then eventually begin experiencing that rhythm not merely as familiar, but as morally correct.
Most of the time this is harmless.
But the same instinct scales remarkably badly.
Because humans are very good at taking arbitrary conventions learned through repetition and slowly reclassifying them as:
- natural,
- proper,
- civilised,
- and morally correct.
And once that happens, disagreement no longer feels like difference.
The convention stops being arbitrary and starts feeling like nature itself — as though the way things have always been done is simply the way things are.
Difference becomes deviance.
Just try choosing your own pronouns.
Which is perhaps worth remembering the next time a convention feels self-evident.
Anyway.
You do you. Just write the numbers properly.