I kid you not. (That's
Bell Canada, by the way.) If I were writing a novel and I made that line up, my editor would say, "Come on, Nick, that's just not plausible."
As to why you have to press
1 7 for English, my best guess is as follows. Obviously for service in French, you must have to press
1 (after all, French is Canada's other official language). I'm guessing
Inuktitut is
2, and if so, I applaud Bell Canada: it's about time Canada's First-Nations peoples got their proper respect. (You can probably see where I'm going with this: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, ... all the way up to
17.)
Enough cheap wisecracks ... But at this point I think I'll skip the silly jokes and instead use the mention of proper respect for Canada's First-Nations peoples as an excuse to comment on what I think is
perhaps Canada's greatest shame: the way native people here have been treated ever since the first contact by Europeans.
On any number of measures (perhaps the most appalling example being suicide rates, which are staggeringly high among native people), Canada's First-Nations peoples are in dire straits. I really don't know too much about all this, but what I do know is very disturbing. And I think it's time that we Canadians face up to our responsibilities.
I recognize that the problems are complex, and I certainly don't claim to know what's going to work. But I do suspect that non-aboriginal Canadians just haven't made this enough of a priority. Speaking for myself, I can say that I'm often far too busy pontificating about problems in other parts of the world (over which I generally have zero influence) to think about what I can do (and what privileges I may have to give up) to make a difference regarding the plight of Canada's First-Nations peoples. And if all this sounds just a bit precious—well, I think that's not really very important.
