Ring.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this 4?”
“No, you’ve got the wrong number, this is 9.”
“Sorry.”
I grew up just outside Madison Wisconsin.
When our telephone (in the late 1950s) changed from a party line, our number was “ACademy 2, 1234”. As a kid though we learned it as “AC2-1234”, and I didn’t know that I was saying the letters “AC”. I thought I was saying the word “Acey” because everyone said their number with a word followed by five numbers.
My mom once told me, years ago, that the “Q” was omitted to avoid confusion with the “O” and “0”, and the “Z” was omitted to avoid confusion with “7”. I can kinda see it…
Did you know that you can “dial” phone numbers without tones and without a dial? The principle behind the standard dial mechanism is that it disconnects the line briefly for each number. You can simulate this with the off-hook button on modern phones.
It’s a little tricky to get the timing just right, especially for higher digits (8, 9, 0), but it can work. It’s an old “Hardy Boys” trick if you have a phone line but not a phone handset (two bare phone wires will do it) and need to alert someone in an emergency, like being kidnapped, or little Timmy is down the well, I guess. I always wished I had such an emergency as a kid so I could show off my arcane rescue knowledge.
Just hit the button rapidly, but in a regular fashion, then pause a little more between digits. The length of the pause is not critical; more is better than less. And be prepared for getting wrong numbers!
1 = click
2 = click, click
3 = click, click, click, etc.
So dialing 721-1234 would be:
click, click, click, click, click, click, click
(pause)
click, click
(pause)
click
(pause)
etc…
Walter Tompkins (K6ATX) used this in one of his teen fiction books about a ham operator who got kidnapped, IIRC. It would work even better today, since the receiving party might have caller ID.
Originally Posted by Johnny L.A.
Why were they omitted in the first place? My guess is that they only had 24 spaces available (having decided that the 1 and 0 keys would not have letters associated with them) and Q and Z were chozen to be dropped because they were not used as often as other letters.
Asked and answered:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_378b.html
And PEnnsylvania 6-5000 still works for the Hotel Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station.
A few years ago I used the above referenced Telephone Exchange Name Project to look up the name for my phone number. I was charmed to discover that it translated to ORegon 5-XXXX, bringing up images of mountain and ocean. (Nevermind that I live in Chelsea, a densely tenemented neighborhood with almost no parks - and when exchange names were still being used, it was a bit slummy.)
I’m 35 and I still remember my dad giving out our phone number in Seattle as LA3-XXXX; only years later did I learn that the LA stood for LAkeview, a blatant lie but it sounded ritzier.
How about the State of Washington, 1983 !!!
I used to dial the phone number of the White Pass ski resort to ask about weather/ski conditions.An old-fashioned sounding operator would answer “White Pass”, and I would ask to be connected to “White Pass One”-which was the ski resort’s phone number.
No, not 4–just 1.!!!
This was 1983–when touch-tone was common, and the first home computers were on sale. (But not at White Pass, Washington)
I remember that we stopped using letters or exchange names about when I was 10, or in 1968. Our number used to be CRestview 5, and the odd thing about that was that there was another exchange in the area called BRadshaw…same numbers, go figure!
Wow…party lines…When I was a little kid we had one, too, and it took me awhile to get that I wasn’t supposed to pick up the phone unless it was “our” ring. And my cousin and I would sometimes pick up the phone quietly and eavesdrop on other peoples’ conversations until we’d get busted for giggling. Sometimes you’d pick up the phone wanting to make a call, and you couldn’t because another party would already be talking on it. You’d have to wait until the other party rang off – there’d be a short ring on all the phones in the system when they did – or, if they really stayed on the line a long time, you might want to ask them to hang up.
I remember our number – TRemont 5-2630. My parents must have had that number for more than fifty years. My mother still had it when she died about five years ago.
About 1985, I was in Washington, Maine outside a shop that was closed, and I had to call the shop’s owner at home from the general store. I was astonished that you only needed to dial four digits for local calls that late in the century.
I remember as a kid my old exchange was ULster - UL8-5908. Even though the U.S. changed to all numbers long ago, many people still used the old exchange names for years, especially in smaller communities where they didn’t have to use new exchanges for a while.
Also, in many small communities where the exchange was the same for the entire local phone company area, you only had to dial the last 4 numbers to make a call. Now you have to dial an area code to call your neighbor 
The original system in London was that every police station had the number 1212, so you could pick up any phone and ask for that number. Most of those numbers have survived unchanged, apart from the additional codes: this page lists them all.
But can you still do the Cap’n Crunch whistle?
Dunno. I swallowed mine by accident. Now when I fart, I toot.
Then the phone rings.