Is it just me or does every phone number in American films and TV shows start with 555?
Is this just a really common part of phone numbers? Why do all the films use the same 3 digits?
Nah, we don’t. It’s done so that weirdos can’t hassle people with phone calls, since it’s difficult (or nobody wants to bother) finding a non-functional phone number.
Straight from the Master:
Why do phone numbers in TV shows and movies all start with 555?
I’ll give you a serious answer, in the off-chance that you’re asking a serious question.
Films, TV, and music use the 555 prefix because it doesn’t exist. It’s a fairly proven occurance (God Almighty, that 80s song 867-5309) that if an actual phone number appears somewhere, people will call it. Enough innocent people have complained about getting bombarded with phone calls that real numbers are no longer used.
It’s actually used because NO telephone numbers have that prefix (or office code, as it is propery called). It was reserved for fictional use.
It’s so they can use phone numbers in movies and TV and not worry about the poor shmoe who happens to have that number getting bombarded by calls from idiots who want to talk to the characters in the movie.
I believe they used an actual non-555 number in “Bruce Almighty”, and the poor person with the number was getting calls from people wanting to talk to God.
Well, shoot. IrreverentTone (there’s someone you would expect to know about phones!) and dwc1970 beat me to it. Suffice it to say that there are no telephone numbers in the US that start with 555, which is precisely why such numbers are used.
As an aside, does anyone remember the case where a movie deliberately used a good phone number, with the number set up with some sort of sales pitch in the LA area? However, as IrreverentTone implied above, wierdos all over the country decided to dial it (if you say it, they will dial it) giving people elsewhere in the country who really had the number a lot of headaches.
Yes, there was this woman in Florida, and this man near Manchester at least.
Thanks all. That makes sense, I suppose there will always jokers who decide to dial numbers from movies.
I believe that the 800 number for Tom Cruise’s character’s program in Magnolia was set up as an actual functional number complete with the whole fictional sales pitch. . .
Also, a few 866 (toll-free I think?) numbers are given during the radio commercials in the video game GTA: Vice City, which are also apparently functional numbers.
I once dialed 976-EVIL on a whim. I got a phone sex line. Which might have been fun, except that I was 14.
Had an interesting conversation with mom and dad when the next phone bill came :o
For those of you who remember older shows from the days when phone numbers included names for the exchanges (My number when I was a kid was Northfield 8-9193) - anyway, the old Klondike 5-XXXX is, in fact, 555-XXXX.
But you already knew that, right?
Actually, it’s only 555-0100 to 555-0199 (in any Canada/US geographic area code) that will never be assigned, and can thus be used in fiction. The numbering gods of the North American Numbering Plan Administration decided, in their wisdom, to add confusion and make all the other 555-numbers available.
Paragraph 4.6 of the “555 NXX Assignment Guidelines” (warning: MS Word .doc file) published by the Alliance for Telecommunications Solutions states:
On the linked NANPA website, hit “Number Assignments”, then hit “555 line numbers” to get a page from where you can download a zipped text list of who got which 555-number.
[sub]Can’t link directly to the page. Bloody frame-using web designers…[/sub]
::ahem:: If I may offer a correction to about 90% of your replies. Yes, there is a 555- prefix in the U.S., but it is limited to the directory assistance for each state (555-1212). For example, if you wanted to find a number in Alaska, you would dial 907-555-1212.
Guess that means someone may have been assigned 555-2368 by now. That was the number printed on the sample dial in a booklet produced by Ohio Bell and used to teach telephone courtesy, communication history, and related topics to my third-grade classmates and me back in 1967 or '68.
How in the hell could you remember that?! 
:eek:
You beat me to it. You can also get listings for toll-free WATS lines by dialling 1-800-555-1212. Any of the toll-free exchanges (currently 800, 866, 877, and 888, I believe) should work.
How can someone that stupid be capable of using a phone?
There are also other 55x exchanges. For instance, 550 and 551 are used as ringback exchanges in many areas. They are meant for telco technicians to check lines with.
IIRC, in the movie The Santa Clause the number 1-800-SPANK-ME was mentioned before such a number actually went into existence. 
And on the subject of remembering 555 numbers, 555-8722 was used in an episode of Full House. 
I thought that 1-800-SPANK-ME would already have been taken by an, um, ‘commercial service provider’?
Also (for the benefit of our non-NANPA readers)…
North American phone numbers are ten digits long: 3 digits of area code, 3 digits of exchange code, and 4 digits of line number. They look like NXX-NXX-XXXX, where X is any digit 0 -9, N is any digit 2-9.
(For reasons I won’t go deeply into, area codes and exchange codes can’t start with 0 or 1. I will say that, inside North America, 1 and 0 are the trunk access codes, used for dialing long-distance or to another area code: 1-NXX-NXX-XXXX or 0-NXX-NXX-XXXX. 1 also happens to be the NANPA’s country code, but the country code is only used when dialing from outside the NANP.)
‘976 numbers’ are an older form of extra-cost access number similar to those in area code 900. Each geographic area code (AC) could have a 976 exchange. The same NXX-976-XXXX line number could be used for different purposes in different area codes.
Similarly, there was a 950 exchange in each geographic area code that was intended for toll-free access to services: NXX-950-XXXX.
One advantage of these numbers is that they look like local exchanges, and can be dialed as 7-digit local calls, without having to dial an area code. Thus, when Diceman dialed 976-EVIL, he was routed to the 976-EVIL service provider in his area code, and extra charges appeared on the phone bill. Hence the little ‘discussion’ later.
The 555-numbers described in the linked pages above appear to be similar.
These 976 and 950 exchanges have largely been superseded by non-geographic (toll-free (800, 888, 877, 866, 855) and extra-cost (900)) area codes.
A service provider could buy a number in one of these non-geographic area codes, and have it available for dialing in as many geographic area codes as desired, instead of having to re-buy the same 976 or 950 line number in area code after area code…
Many areas in the NANP have moved to ten-digit dialing, where the area code is dialed with every call. This removes the 7-digit-dialing advantage of 950 and 976 numbers, relative to the longer toll-free and area-code 900 numbers. It may help sleazeoid service providers disguise the fact that their NXX-976-XXXX number in the local area code is not a low-cost local call though…