i just realised that, should i ever lose my phone or sim card or whatever, i have absolutely no idea what are the actual phone numbers of my loved ones. (or anyone else for that matter) hmm…
I call my sister on her cell phone multiple times a day. We joke that her phone number is “contacts, J, down, down, send.” I don’t think she knows my cell number either.
I’ve got everything written down on a small piece of paper that’s stuffed into an obscure recess of my wallet.
This is what bluetooth is for. Use it to automagically sync to the address book on your Mac every once in awhile. You still won’t know the numbers but at least you won’t be screwed unless you lose your cell phone the same day your hard drive crashes.
I used to pride myself on my ability to remember all of the numbers in my life. I can remember tons of phone numbers, personal id (dl, ssn, etc) numbers, account numbers. The list goes on. But, at some point I just stopped recording them in my brain. It’s like the DMZ. On one side are all the things I remember and on the other are all the things I have to look up on my phone. When I call my wife from my cell phone, I dial her number. My daughter though is on the other side of the DMZ. I call her by scrolling back through my calls list or looking her up in the address book.
I have an actual address book that I wrote all the numbers and addresses and assorted other crap I need.
Ditto. Too easy to crash the computer or lose the phone. Always have a written back-up if possible.
Me too, though I rarely use it anymore. At one point in my current relationship, I decided that my GF merited inclusion in The Book. I realized how completely out of date it is. Name, address, phone. No space for cell or e-mail. And there are entries in there for people that died during the Reagan administration.
Count me in with Dolores. My job requires me to move to a different country every 2-3 years which means a new cell phone. I actually have an old fashion Filofax with all my numbers and addresses in it. If I lost that, I’d be screwed.
I use gmail to store all my contacts, that way I can access it wherever I am. I would use blue tooth synch but my computer doesn’t seem to want to do it anymore since I got my new phone a year ago. If I had hundreds of contacts I’d be bothered but as I’ve only got about 30 it’s not a problem.
I’m covered. I got my Mom’s home phone number memorized.
It’s amusing that I just happened to get a call at work from my sister today, to ask “What’s (other sister’s) cell number?”
Been telling my kids for several years now that they should keep phone numbers somewhere besides in the phone. They still haven’t learned that lesson, even though one of them dropped her phone into the toilet and the other one had hers stolen.
I did things the other way around. Transferred all the numbers from the “address box” to the phone. Now I don’t have to be home to call other people than immediate family. But I still have the box. It has addresses and phone numbers, birthdays and anniversaries. We’ve also taken to keeping the userID and password information in it. It might be the most organized thing in my house. In case of fire I think that’s what I grab.
(In case anybody wants to know, it’s an index card box. Makes it easy to change things.)
At my younger daughter’s insistance, I got a trakphone. I bought airtime for one year, back in January. I put all of my family’s phone numbers into it, w/ ICE (that is, In Case of Emergency) next to my husband’s cell phone number.
I have no idea where the phone is…don’t think I’ve seen it since, oh, April.
I have a usb cable for my phone, and I use bitpim to sync it to my computer. That in turn gets backed up nightly to an external drive automatically.
I just bought a new phone and Sprint was able to transfer all of my contacts with their ‘Mobile Sync’ or whatever. But before this phone, with every other phone I’ve had I’ve used a usb cable and bitpim to keep my contacts on my work and home computers, and to sync them from old to new phones.
I was able to export a CSV file from BitPim then import it to GrandCentral, so I also have an online address book that I use pretty frequently. And I have 2 printed copies of the file, one at work and one at home.
I know there’s some kind of main emergency number that I should know by heart. Now, if I could only remember what it was…
I keep an excel workbook with all of the information in it. I have a tab for phone numbers with columns for house, cell etc. and another tab for addresses. It’s great because when I need to send Holiday cards, I can create address labels with just a few clicks.
I’d hate to know how often you call the people you have on speed dial! 
I just use address book on my mac. Right now I could have to reinput everything into my crappy phone, but someday I’ll be wealthy and have an iphone in which case it will just synch automagically. Although there’s random lists of numbers floating around on scraps of paper and text documents on my computer that I haven’t input yet. My friend, who has either broken his phone or had someone throw him in water while having it on his person at least four times this year, just looks at the numbers on his phone bill.
Not just one main emergency number, there are nine hundred and eleven of them :eek:. Just how do they expect us to remember that many different numbers! :rolleyes: 
We keep all our family phone numbers in our Palm Pilots. Which are backed up to two different computers. And many of them are in the cell phones also. I signed up for some sort of contact-list-backup thingy through Verizon so, supposedly, if my cell phone bites the dust this would allow me to restore them easily.
I do use the “ICE” notation on two numbers: home, and Typo Knig’s cell. My phone has voice dialing, so I can be heard saying “call ice home home” which I’m sure sounds puzzling to anyone around me!
For a long time now I’ve been synchronising everything between my not-expensive-at-the-time phone and Outlook. If only the phone could understand skipping a week on recurring appointments, it would be a lot more useful!