Once a person left the house, you couldnât reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldnât be long distance (oh yeah hereâs one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you werenât calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because youâre going through their city. Itâs like, âHey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper.â
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: whoâs got that kind of time when youâre using a rotary phone?
That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldnât give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if youâre calling locally. The phone system will just assume youâre calling the local area code if you donât dial one. In my area, itâs pretty easy because the only people who donât have the local area code (thereâs only one even though itâs far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.
My grandmother still had the list of her friendsâ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. Youâd pick up and wait for the operator â no dialing â and then say âMidland 4119â or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
By the time I was young, theyâd replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadnât taken down her cheat sheet yet.
