Basically true, but I remember my wife’s and my numbers more from when I have to tell people or put in a form.
When my wife and I got new cell numbers when we came back to Japan, we chose numbers that had the same last four digits. That helped.
My own, my mother’s, my work, and the number my late grandma had when I was 17 that I still use for membership prices at Safeway and Albertsons.
I know my number and my daughter’s, both of which I picked out as easy-to-memorize. Stores and restaurants here have (often worthless) memberships which are accessed by reciting a phone number.
There’s at least one (now useless) 20th-century number I still know, because I’d mapped the 9 digits to 9 memorable letters.
Most area codes have 0 or 1 as the 2nd digit.
You’re thinking of the ‘prefix’ or ‘exchange.’ All L.A. numbers have a 555 prefix.
In 1976 I met a lady who worked as a telephone information operator. This was before they had computers to help with their job, and had to use books themselves. I asked her how they usually gave their answers so quickly. She said they had many of the more used numbers memorized. So I tested her on a local office supplies store, a hardware store, a few things like that whose numbers I happened to remember. She knew almost all of them by heart.
Same as many; wife, mine, childhood AND BEECHWOOD 4-5789.
That’s an old song by the Marvelettes.
The only numbers I can remember are the house phone in the house I lived in when I was about 10, and my first ever mobile phone number. I can’t even remember my current mobile number.
Don’t know if it still is, but the SSN was a required part of the address when writing to someone at a military installation. I learned his well before I memorised my own.
Interesting. That was not USAF or Army practice in the 1980s, whether overseas or stateside.
I have no clue about USN where you were. But I suspect it was a Navy / FPO-ism.
And with a good-sized contingent of folks just barely getting by.
When I got my first license in the early 80’s, I was asked if I wanted to use my SSN as my license number. I declined as that struck even teenage me as a phenomenally bad idea.
When I started college (University of Wisconsin-Madison) in '83, our student numbers were just our SSNs, with an extra “check digit” appended on the end. I guess it was sometime after the 1980s that people generally started to realize that using an SSN for general identification was a bad idea.
Paid tribute to by Wilson Pickett when he did 634-5789.