I knew that post would make someone feel old, and then it would become an endless recursive pattern of feeling old.
I have a lot of older friends so my complaints often fall on deaf ears. I keep telling them, “But this if the oldest I’ve ever been!”
I remember one time when I was working at a thrift store (about 10 years ago now), and one of my 20-something co-workers held up an 8-track tape and asked what it was. Our supervisor (about my age, roughly mid-40s) and I traded eyerolls, then it was explained to the kid.
In the city where I lived in S. Indiana for many years, all numbers except municipal offices and numbers for the university, excluding the dormitory residence numbers, could be written and remembered as five-digit numbers, because every residential number began with 33, and this was true up until about 1990.
Even when you couldn’t write the number as a five digit because it was campus or municipal, you could actually just say “campus” or “municipal,” and then give the last FOUR, because all campus had the same prefix, and all the city had the same prefix.
That didn’t last forever either, and I understand all campus numbers have their own area code now.
For a long time, all of the numbers at UCLA had the 825 prefix, which just happens to spell “U-C-L”, but that turns out to have been a coincidence.
In 1985 I wanted to make a reservation for a couple nights in the motel at Stovepipe Wells in the middle of Death Valley. I had to go to the library and get the phone book for the area, then look up their number in the yellow pages. I kind of blinked at it, then went back home to call on my landline, since I had no cell phone.
I dialed 00 and when the nice lady answered I said, “I want to reach the Stovepipe Wells Motel and their listing says, ‘dial double-oh and ask for operator 52’ so here I am.”
… “Could I put you on hold for a minute? I’m going to have to ask about this.”
“I don’t doubt it.” During the wait I wondered if this was the last non-direct dial location in the country.
She came back with, I assume, operator 52 who in a few moments got me connected with the motel. After that things went as usual.
I just looked them up and forty years later they have a regular ol’ number.