Exactly. My parents live in SE Ohio, where the area code is 330. They have to dial eleven digits (like 1-330-555-1234) just to call across the street.
When I was going to Wisconsin-Madison and living in the dorms there in the mid 90’s on-campus calls only required 5 digit dialing, as everything on campus was 26x-xxxx.
And there was a trick I only vaguely remember that involved dialing 8 before making a long-distance call…that caused the billing to go through the University’s long distance provider and was cheaper than if you dialed straight (volume discount?).
The number one journal checked out of the MIT Engineering Library was the issue of the Bell Labs Technical Journal that gave the signaling frequencies.
There were simpler hacks also, none possible now. On payphones, the same wire was used for the phone to transmit the indication that money was deposited and for the operator or switch to send the signal to drop the money into the coin box. (If the line was busy or did not answer, the money went from a buffer to the coin return slot.) Placing a diode on this line prevented the money collection signal from reaching the phone even if the call was connected.
The main way this was fixed was by separating voice and control channels.
I suspect that the university had a PBX, so this was the same as people in a business being able to dial an extension to reach anywhere in the company, no matter where in the world they are.
As for the second point, as other long distance providers became available, a lot of systems had the property that five digit numbers might cause a call to be more expensive then a full number. As pbx’s got smarter, they allowed the administrators to automatically choose the cheapest line for a call, so this kind of thing went away.
same in phila pa. having a ce (center), lo(cust) meant you were in the high flying center city exchanges.
my mum (until her personal journey to paradise) would always give the home phone number with the exchange letters. my aunt who has had her number for over 50 years and counting has learned the numbers.
Or Centrex service. Centrex was very popular with college campuses.
This sounds like the place to ask this:
My SIL was listening to her messages with the cell phone on speaker phone, and the baby did his screaming thing, where he just yells as gets close to actually crying. Her phone then said, “Message saved”. Does that kind of system literally work on the frequency set, so that he could hit close enough to simulate number 3 or whatever?
Where I grew up, you could also just say, “The Sweet Shop please,” and the operator would put your through. Or, sometimes, they’d just tell you, “That line is busy, try them a little later.”
As for long distance calling, there were two versions - station to station and person to person. If you just wanted to call a residence and talk to anyone there, you called sts. If you wanted to talk to a specific person, you called ptp, but if they weren’t there, you weren’t charged for the call. And if they were there, you paid a premium for the call. And if the home telephone you were calling was busy, often the operator would ask you to hang up, and she’d try the number for a while until she got through. Then your phone would ring and the operator would say, “I have your party on the line. Go ahead please.” And you’d start talking and the operator would click off. AND - when you were done with the call, you could call the operator back and ask for “time and charges.” She’d calculate how long your call lasted and what you would be charged.
And one scam many folks used to employ was based on the person to person deal. If, say, a relative (say, John Smith) were taking a trip to California and you wanted to know that he arrived safely, you might arrange for him to call you at a certain time by placing a person to person call to a fictitious name when he arrived at his destination. When your phone rang, the operator would say, "I have a person to person call for (say) Howdy Doody from a Mr. John Smith. And you’d say, he’s not here right now. But, of course, what you really wanted to know was that John Smith made it to California all right, which that call would verify.
The phone system was anchored by people - the operators - and that made it waaaay different from the way it is today. xo, C.
And in the backwoods where I am we too are caught up in the mandatory area code dialing. What a PITA!
Now another big problem arises out of this.
My cell phone dialing list. I don’t remember very many phone numbers anymore. Getting to dependent on the phone list.
Thank you so much for that, commasense . When my aunt was 16 or so, she worked as a telephone operator in Douglas MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane during WW2. She is now obviously getting on in years, and while she has told me about those days, I didn’t get the detail of the phone operating system (although I understood the general idea). Your post gave me a bit more clarity about the nuts and bolts of workaday life.
As an aside, she told me the girls at the switch were under strict instructions that if Macarthur placed a call they absolutely had to pick it up within 2 seconds to connect him or else all hell would break loose. They lived in mortal terror of missing the 2 second window. Ole Doug must have been an impatient bloke.
My dad used exactly that [del]scam[/del] technique when he was on the road. He had an answering service and would call in once or twice a day, placing a P-to-P call for “Joe Sam.” If there were no messages, Mr. Sam was not in and there would be no charge.
When he was home (where his office was) the service would ring through to the house exactly three times, then take a message. He generally took the call, even after hours, but not on holidays. Our friends knew to let the phone ring a few extra times in such cases. One Thanksgiving we were eating dinner with an old college buddy of his, who worked for Bell. The phone rang, and nobody did anything, which made him look up. “You gonna answer that?”
“Dunno yet.” (ring)
Twitching a little, “You gotta answer it. It might be important.” (ring)
“No I don’t . . .” (silence) “. . .and I’m not.”
Really agitated now, the buddy wanted to know what was going on and had it explained to him. “That’s horrible. You’re costing us money!” Dad gave him the fifties equivalent of like I care. I don’t think he ever told his buddy the Joe Sam thing. His head would have 'sploded.
In university in the late 60s, my mom was a long-distance operator. Her most memorable story was when a woebegone, somewhat inebriated gentleman placed a person-to-person call to a strip club in New Orleans, asking for Boobs Galore. So my mom had to connect to the club and primly announce, “Person to person for Boobs Galore.”
Better yet, Ms. Galore apparently worked in several different places and had rather a spotty employment history, so Mom was directed to, and had to try, several different clubs. I don’t recall whether the gentleman ever managed to complete his call as dialed.
That guy must have been a company executive, to be that unaware of how the system really worked.
Any operator (local or long distance) was well aware of the technique of calling your home person-to-person for yourself, and just let it happen. They considered it a good investment in keeping customers happy, and getting them accustomed to calling long distance. And many times those got switched to station-to-station calls, when someone at home needed to talk to the traveler about something, so then the phone company did make money on the call.
This thread reminds me of one of my favorite stories from my Grandpa.
He grew up in the 1920s and 30s in the very tiny, rural village of Cornwall, Conn. Because the town was so small, rural and very hilly, they were slow in getting services like electricity and phone service. My great-grandpa (and my grandpa, and my dad after him) was really interested in new interesting gadgets, so when the service became available, they got a phone. Their phone number was, literally, COrnwall 2. (The mayor was 1.) Apparently, there was a wealthy family in town that was pretty put out that they were relegated to being COrnwall 3.
Years later, after longer phone numbers were being phased in elsewhere, my grandpa was away from home and called in to a long-distance operator and said he wanted COrnwall 2.
“2 what?” they asked him.
“Just 2. Call the operator there, they’ll know,” he said.
They were apparently pretty flustered when they got back on the line with him and connected him to his parents’ house, at COrnwall 2. 
At one time a block of numbers on LEYtonstone was christened KEYstone for subs who didn’t want the social disgrace of a Leytonstone number. For similar reasons BEThnal Green was renamed ADVance at quite a late stage in the planning.
The letter to number correspondence has changed with at least some newer phones. Z used to be on the 0 position; I see on my cordless phone that it has been put on the 9 button. I don’t think the others are quite the same either, but that one is obvious. A predecessor (at least in Canada) of 1-800 numbers were “Zenith” numbers. They had to be placed through the operator and the person making the call wasn’t charged for them. You couldn’t possibly dial them yourself, since the first digit (corresponding to the Z in Zenith) was 0.
I once saw the 1920s-era phone directory for Nags Head, N.C., where my grandparents had a beach house. It was a single sheet of paper with perhaps two dozen phone numbers listed. Nags Head now has almost 3,000 residents and a considerably thicker phone book.
Staff Report from last year of some relevance.
“What’s this? 646?!”
When I was a teenager and away from home (long distance), my mother would tell me to call every night and have the operator “reverse the charges”. She just couldn’t bring herself to say “Call collect”.