Goodbye Old Friend – Some Things Never Change

Goodbye Old Friend – Some Things Never Change was Originally Posted on September 20, 2013 by lavarock

This is not a very technical blog posting, so don’t think because I mention telephones that it will get deep into any techy-type talk.

I have a couple of telephone numbers in San Francisco I got because they were free to get and use. The company that issued them is going out of business and although I COULD, I probably WON’T keep them. One number I used when I was required to give a company a telephone number, but did not want to. You know, some websites require a number even if you want to only be contacted by email or physical mail. The number went to voicemail and most people calling would not leave voicemail messages, so it served its purpose.

The second number was also in the San Francisco area and it had lots of repeating digits, in fact it was almost all 7’s and zeros. It was very easy to remember and I used it primarily for testing.

Now that the company who supplied them is going out of business I could move them to a cheap provider, but at a cost of $12 a year, it is not worth it. So like a warm old sweater with some holes in it, it is time to retire these telephone numbers. I had them perhaps 5 years and they served me well.

This is completely the opposite of a problem my Grandmother had. She had the same telephone number most of her life. As she got elderly, she and my Grandfather decided to sell their house and move across town to an apartment. She tried to keep the same telephone number, but the phone company wanted to change it. I intervened and they agreed to let her keep the number that she had had for 30 or more years. In her case, she had many elderly friends and changing that number would mean that many of them might think she died (getting a disconnected number message) and never bother to check for a new number. Nowadays we store numbers in PDAs and cellphones. Back then they used paper and in most cases a PEN rather than pencil to write numbers. I remember my Mom changing numbers for people all the time, still using pen which showed up better and didn’t smudge like a pencil would. Periodically she would buy a new address book and manually copy all of the names and addresses over.

Much later, the FCC decided that although you don’t really OWN a telephone number, you should be able to move it along with your furniture and keep it as long as you want. The phone number was an identification of you that deserved to be kept if you wanted. It didn’t work that way in all cases, but now you can hold on to that number with a process they call “porting” as in making it portable.

So, do we really need to keep telephone numbers? I can tell you the two numbers my Dad used for his business in the 1950’s. Our home number was the 3rd number in that series. I also remember my Grandmothers number from back then, the number she was able to keep. The area code has changed for those exchanges though.

When we moved to Princeton NJ, we went from net-tech to old-tech in the 50’s because Princeton had not yet converted their telephone service to direct dial. We had to ask the operator to connect us.

When you were young, you were issued a Social Security number. I always remembered mine but was surprised to see that many people had to look it up when they needed it. When the phone companies came up with telephone numbers, they determined just how many digits people could expect to remember. That is in the same range of numbers that a Social Security number was comprised of.

Most of my family was in real estate and we built a few developments along the way. Whenever possible, when my Dad needed to create a street address for our own house, the number was 55. 55 this street, 55 that street. 55 was his number. I never asked him why but after his death I think I discovered the reason. He had an old photo of his military outfit in a scrapbook. When you looked at the photo there was a caption underneath listing each member. His number on the photo, 55. I have to assume that each member of the team had a position (not unlike when you sit in a classroom in the same seat each day). That is what I think it meant.

Do we remember things like telephone numbers? Yes! Do we remember things that are not quite so important? Yes! Are there times we remember insignificant things? Absolutely.

In 6th grade we would call the roll each morning. The teacher (can’t remember who it was) would pass the list to someone in the class who would then read the last names and each person would say “here”. So how hard would it be to remember the names of the people in your 6th grade class, in alphabetical order? Not hard at all it seems.

Ballinger, Bouche, Counts, Elkins, Fuel, Foreseman, Gibson, Hollister, King, Kreiger, Laurie, McBride, Rawlston, Shultise, Stouffer, Stevenson, Ichard and Drummond. The last two came in late in the year and ended up at the end of the list. I probably have them mispelled but that was the class roster. So how neat is that? I should look up the yearbook to see if I missed anyone but I doubt it.

When I was a teen, I spent lots of time in Point Pleasant NJ and some of it at the beach. I remember lying on the sand once and falling asleep. When I awoke I had the worst sunburn of my life. There was no way to rub burn lotion on it, and I ended up with 2 cans of spray on Solarcaine. I sat up all night, unable to sleep. When I visited that beach a few months ago I went up to see the damage “Sandy” had caused. There not far from a giant earth moving machine was a spot of sand. THE spot of sand. I was about to point out that spot to the relatives with me, to tell them the story of the sunburn. They were living in a house rebuilt on the same spot as the house where I sat up all night. I didn’t though.

As we get older we find that some of these memories don’t matter to the people we know or associate with; they just matter to us. Those “When *I* was a kid we walked 10 miles in the snow, in our bare feet” type stories.

I can see it now, talking to someone years from now. “When I was young, I fell asleep on that beach” to which the reply will inevitable be “Oh not the sunburn on the beach story! You told that to us like 30 times already. Big Deal!”

“When I was young, we had to say “Operator, can you connect me to Walnut 5-1234?”. Today we just say to our phone “Dial 925-1234″.

Some things NEVER change!

So we carry things like names, numbers and thoughts with us most of our life. Some are important to us, some are not, but keep them we do.