The Rule of Thumbs

Last week something happened that caused me to reminisce about times gone by. I'm talking times WAY gone by. I'm talking B.C. That's Before Cell phones. Way back then there was a form of price gouging foisted upon us by the monopolistic A T & T, also known as Ma Bell. This outrage was known as "Long Distance". I know most of you young'ns out there may never have heard of it but it was an additional charge from several cents to several dollars for every stinking minute of conversation just because the person you called didn't happen to live near you.

This caused you to seriously consider not only the necessity of the conversation, but how dear your feelings were for the person on the other end. I'm so old I remember when we didn't even HAVE a telephone. There were only three in all of Atomic City. One time, when I was in the 6th grade at Moreland Elementary (30 miles from A.C.), I had to call home because my left leg fell off or something like that. I had the operator place the call to phone #3 at Fackrell's Texaco to have someone there go get my Mom (who didn't drive) and have her call the school. I'm not sure exactly what she was supposed to do about my missing limb but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

It was so exciting when they ran a new phone line to A.C. and we got our very own phone! It was a "party" line that wasn't much of a party. That meant there were several other homes that shared one single line and you had to wait until no one else was using it if you wanted to make a call. When it rang (there was actually a bell inside the phone that went ding-ding-ding) we had to wait to see if it was "our" ring which was one long and two short rings.

It was free to call the Blackfoot area that was 30 miles southeast of us but it was long distance to Arco that was 30 miles northwest, go figure. Back then they didn't think human beings could remember all seven digits of a phone number so they gave us a mnemonic help for the prefix. Our number was MUrdock 4-5033 (684-5033). Yes Virginia, that's the real reason there are letters under digits on your phone. Blackfoot was SUnset 5-xxxx. Cool, huh? I have no idea why there are no letters under the number 1, but back then there were only three letters for each of the other numbers. They left out the letters Q and Z.

They must have been added to the 7 and 9 with the advent of text messaging when we started talking with our thumbs...