Future Expansion

Call the main number listed on Dell's web site (1-800-WWW-DELL) . Go ahead, I'll wait. Choose option 1 to dial an extension.

You are greeted with a message about how Dell is in the process of upgrading their extensions from 5 digits to 7 digits.

Now, Dell has more than 55,000 employees, so it makes sense that they would need more than 5 digits. Nearly all of those employees have phone extensions, and with turnover it's easy to see how you could use up the 100,000 extensions that 5 digits give you. In fact, since you probably don't want to use 00000-09999 as extensions, your down to 89,999.

And, when you're doing a major upgrade like this, you probably don't want to just move from 5 digits to 6 digits. Hardly seems worth it. So you go for 7 digits.

But 7 digits gives you 9 million extensions. That's some serious growth planning.