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Inspired by a recent post on Neil Gaiman’s website.

As a child, I knew everyone’s phone numbers. Well, mostly everyone. I could call most family and several friends. I knew their license plates, too, but we won’t talk about THAT odd habit.

Now, it really helped that my town was so small we had one exchange, and it was shared with another town… or two… so most of the numbers had the same first three digits. Even in my twenties, when I branched out into the “big city” that had 5 exchanges, I could keep up with almost everyone.

I think the cell phone explosion is what killed it for me. Not that I HAD one, because I didn’t until late 2002. It was because everyone else did. It just became a little too much. I had to effectively double the amount of numbers I knew. The fact that they started making us dial the area code for all long distance calls, even within your own area code, just made it worse. It was something they didn’t make us do in the 70s and 80s, so I had to know 3 extra digits. Not TOO bad, til I joined the military and started moving around the country, and watched all sorts of area codes change.

I gave up completely when I moved to San Diego. Now, I have 3 area codes just within the county. I work in one, and live in another 15 minutes away. I actually had a choice of which area code I wanted when setting up home and cell service. My phone number is 10 digits now, period, end of story. So is everyone else’s. Plus, all those old numbers I still remember that don’t exist anymore get confused with updated numbers. I have to consult a cell phone to call my sisters now… and sometimes I have to double-check against the wife’s celly just to be sure I don’t have an older number.

And then there’s the fact that I’ve gotten so old that I keep a list of the 4-digit phone numbers I dial at work, because I can’t track them anymore.

That’s another story.