Number in lap of long-distance telecoms gods

Sometimes, those recorded messages you get when you try to telephone long distance and fail to get through don't mean what they say.

With PCCW, when you try to phone Afghanistan, country code 93, the message you get is: 'Sorry - your number cannot be connected as dialed. Please check your calling number and try again'.

Same problem with PCCW's 0060 and Wharf-Cable's IDD 007.

This unexpected glitch was exposed when our well-connected foreign editor tried to set up an interview with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, arranged through the Afghan Embassy in Washington. At the appointed time, the call was made, and up it came again - the same pesky message. Sure, they're still in the process of mopping up a war, 20 years of foreign occupation, civil war and banditry.

But since the overthrow of the Taleban last October, the phone lines have been restored, television and radio stations have gone back on the air.

So our resourceful scribe was further stunned to discover that the call could be connected from our allegedly less-developed neighbours in the Philippines, Thailand and India. He was positively gob-smacked to find he could make a PCCW IDD 001 call from Hong Kong to the most secluded, least developed countries in the world: Bhutan, country code 975, North Korea, 850 and East Timor, 670.