So I am filling in a profile on an Australian based recruiters website, and have to fill in a contact phone number in order for the form to be submitted. The text under the entry box seems to imply that I should be OK entering my US based phone number, (and in another field I can mark my country of residence as being in the US):
You must enter at least one phone number. Please ensure international dial code is specified.
So I enter my cell phone number +1803456XXXX (no - not my phone number), and then tab out of the field. My jaw drops as the page replaces what I typed in with +613456XXXX. I do it again just to verify that I actually did type in what I thought I did, and get the same result. I also enter my home phone number (with the same area code) and see a similar result. I then fire off an email to their website support basically saying that their phone number validation is fucked and I can't create a profile until it is fixed.
My next step is of course to come here and bitch about my experience. In an attempt to provide an anonymized phone number I fall back on Jenny's number and enter 15558675309 into the fucked up field in order to get something to post here. To my surprise the phone number remains as I entered it. WTF?!?!?!? It screws up my valid phone number but happily takes a fake one????
Then the penny drops and I realize how well and truly the phone number validation code is fucked up. In Australia a leading zero is used to mark the start of the area code part of a phone number (yes there are other uses for it, but bear with me. See [1] if you want to be pedantic), so if I was in Sydney (02 area code) and Jenny was in Melbourne (03 area code) I would dial 038675309 (well actually not, as in Australia the number part is 8 digits. But you get the idea; still, hang onto that 8 digit requirement.).
What the validation code did was take my +1803456XXXX, spot the 03 and think that this was the start of the phone number (and for some reason forgetting that the +18 existed), delete the +18 and now see the phone number as 03456XXXX. Then it goes "Oh wow, that looks like a Melbourne based number, but it doesn't have the +61 Australian country code prefix. I know how to fix that!". So then it drops the leading zero, and prefixes the lot with +61 to get the final answer of +613456XXXX and accepts that as a valid number.
The kicker is that the number it came up with is 1 digit shy of a valid Melbourne phone number.
[1] Telephone numbers in Australia</a.