Phone systems are just so last century

I have a guest in town and gave him my phone number and he tried to reach me for a ride home from public transport but got screwed by the phone system. It turns out he was dialing our 510 area code numbers from a payphone in San Francisco without a leading 1 for lond distance. Being from rural Canada he wouldn't think that you'd need to dial a long distance number reach someone just 10 miles away - they just don't have that many area codes there, let alone in the boonies whereas I'm pretty sure we have at least a half dozen in the Bay Area (of which 415, 510, 408, 650 are but a few).

But isn't it ridiculous, in this day an age that the phone system would tell him his "number is invalid" just because he dialed it without a 1? I mean come on, if someone dials ten digits couldn't you just guess it is perhaps a long distance? Isn't the 1 implied unless someone adds an International prefix? Clearly not on our nations gloriously antiquated phones, but it has to be said that is LAME - about as lame as a web browser these days that required someone to actually type "http://" in front of every URL. Do you remember those days when radio show hosts would be forced to say out loud "aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-you double-you double-you dot" etc. etc. Fortunately I don't think such browsers really exist any more, and most can figure out if a www prefix is needed and try .com, .net, .org etc suffix if omitted.