What's in a Number?

 

Remember when you used to be able to tell what county a person in New Mexico lived in by the first digit on the license plate. Bernalillo was two. Santa Fe one. They stopped that. Needed all possible six digits to have enough number combinations.

And the area code of your telephone number also gave you a location. New Mexico was 505 and Colorado 303. Then Albuquerque and Denver got too big. Albuquerque kept 505 and the rest of our state became 575. West Denver kept 303 but east Denver was assigned 720. Northwest Colorado is now 970and Southeast is 719. Now they are considering another number for Denver.

 

Then came cell phones. And their promise of being able to keep your number forever. Stopped the need to reprint checks just about the time we stopped using checks. My sister, to prevent me from never getting another cell phone EVER after I lost my flip phone put me on her family plan. She lived in Victoria, Texas so my area code on my cell was 361.

Texas is a mess. And the area codes around the Houston area are mined by all the telephone spam artists known to man. So with my 361 area code came the misinformation that I lived in Victoria and ergo a sucker. I would get so many calls which I never answered once caller ID said it was from any of the area codes around the east side of Texas. This was over and above the calls from collection agencies after Laura Garcia.

So when I went into T-Mobile to get a new phone I obviously did not want to keep my phone number. I wanted a 575 area code. Everyone else in the store that morning wanted to keep their number and looked at me a bit askance because I did not. I love my new number for so many reasons like losing the assumption I was from Texas when having to put it on some piece of information but most because nobody has tried to contact be about extending the car warranty on my 2003 Explorer. Everyone knows that 575 area code residents do not have an excess of money to spend. No spam calls. Not one.

In fact my new cell phone was so silent I thought it had been set up wrong so I asked friends to call me to be sure it worked. It does. I love my new cellphone and my new telephone number and especially my 575 area code.