How did this approach work for Brussels?
WP: ‘Hello, Sweden speaking’: Official hotline connects you with a random Swedish resident
“Calling Sweden, you will soon be connected to a random Swede.”
Those are the first words one hears when dialing the “Swedish Number,” a new hotline created to connect callers with local residents. A few flat tones later and the caller is patched through to, well, a random Swede.
One such call late Thursday morning connected with David Lamm, a product designer from the nation’s second most-populous city, Gothenburg. Lamm, who speaks English, volunteered to field calls on Wednesday, which was both the day the service launched and his 31st birthday.
“We were sort of invited to answer the phone for Sweden and I thought I had to sign up,” he said.
The conversation on Thursday was Lamm’s seventh through the service. His first was with a pleasant man from Istanbul, who, like this reporter, first asked about the weather. (It was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and raining when we spoke.) Lamm also spoke with two Americans, he said.
“The interesting thing with both of those guys is that they were sort of calling with a Donald Trump-ish agenda,” he said. “They wanted to hear sort of ‘What the hell are you doing over there in Sweden, taking all those immigrants, all those Muslims.'”
[Finnish was the second language of Sweden for centuries. Now Arabic is overtaking it.]
(The nation welcomed more refugees per capita than much of Europe last year, though that openness has not come without its problems. Authorities have been accused of covering up crime allegedly committed by migrants, resulting in a sometimes-violent backlash.)
Lamm’s conversations were facilitated by the Swedish Number—46-771-793-336, or 46-771-SWEDEN—debuted on Wednesday and was conceived by the Swedish Tourist Association, a nonprofit that runs more than 350 accommodations including hostels, hotels, mountain stations and cabins.
It was launched to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the passage of what many say was the world’s first press freedom law. The hotline itself appears to mark another first: It is the world’s only national phone number connecting callers to local residents, the association said in a statement.
“We want to show the real Sweden – a unique country worth visiting with the right of public access, sustainable tourism, and a rich cultural heritage,” Magnus Ling, general secretary and chief executive officer of the association, said in a statement.
[In order to win back tourists, this European capital wants visitors to dial up random locals]
Just after 11 a.m. on Thursday, that meant Lamm, who, for what it’s worth, defended the refugees his country has welcomed.
“We’ve had problems in Sweden, of course, but it’s mostly due to us being bad at integration projects,
he said. “I wouldn’t blame anything on the people coming here, I mean they’re fleeing for their lives.”
Lamm shared his experience growing up with refugees from the Bosnian conflict: “I grew up with a lot of those that came then and that worked out really good,” he said.
