I went out to enjoy my Saturday Dadcation today. My first stop is usually Borders, where I have some sort of caffeine infusion while writing my 1,000-word quota without distractions.
There was a Harley parked outside, New Hampshire tags, with a big “FOR SALE” sign hanging from the handlebars. It had the owner’s phone number listed, with area code. There was a college-age girl looking at the bike as I went to check it out, and I commented on the sign.
“Kind of redundant to have an area code listed in a state with only one area code.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Isn’t it weird, though? I mean, how can they not run out of numbers with only seven digits in everyone’s phone number?”
“They won’t run out any time soon,” I said. “Seven number slots, with ten possible numbers per slot, that’s ten to the power of seven, for a hundred million possible numbers.”
“Wow,” she replied. “You know your math.”
I just shrugged and smiled, and we both went our separate ways. She probably thought I was an insufferable know-it-all geek.
I’m not entirely sure, but I think that was an eighth-grade math problem when I went to school…ninth grade, tops. Am I just an elitist prick for wondering what the hell they teach in schools these days?
(And no, I wasn’t a math wiz. That was my weakest subject, actually.)
EDIT: 10^7 is actually ten million, not a hundred million. (I’m pretty sure I said “ten million” when I calculated it in my head in front of Borders, actually, because I remember thinking that the population of NH can safely triple without running out of phone numbers in the 603 area code. My Microsoft-supplied scientific calculator led me astray when I ran the numbers again for the blog post. Yeah, sure, dumbass, I can hear you say.)
13 Comments
April 19, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Not to get too picky, 10^7 is 10 million not 100 million; and since phone numbers will not start with a 0 or 1 you are down to 8 million (8×10^6).
April 19, 2008 at 8:13 pm
With the proliferation of cell phones it’s entirely possible that someone looking at the “For Sale” sign might have a phone with a different area code and would need all 10 digits to make the call.
April 19, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Vince Says:
April 19, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Not to get too picky, 10^7 is 10 million not 100 million; and since phone numbers will not start with a 0 or 1 you are down to 8 million (8×10^6).
I think that would make Vince the know-it-all geek. Ha! Actually, I’m just lashing out because I didn’t notice….
April 19, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I think that would make Vince the know-it-all geek.
You must know my wife!
April 19, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Vince,
I’m pretty sure 10^7 is 100,000,000. I just double-checked with a calculator, and I came up with the same number.
And yeah, the cell phone thing is true. (As is the fact that the bike was parked in West Lebanon, five miles from the VT border, but it *did* have NH tags.)
April 19, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Marko,
10^7 is 10,000,000 for sure. Honest to Zeus!
10^1=10 a 1 with 1 zero
10^2=100 a 1 with 2 zeros
10^3=1000 a 1 with 3 zeros
etc etc etc
10^7=10 000 000 a 1 with 7 zeros
QED
April 19, 2008 at 8:56 pm
No, my calculator is mistaken. When I calculate it out on paper, it’s 10,000,000.
Told you I wasn’t a math wiz…
April 19, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Heh. I was reading the post and thought “Oh, man, they are going to jump his shit…“, and I’m practically innumerate.
April 20, 2008 at 12:56 am
and since phone numbers will not start with a 0 or 1 you are down to 8 million (8×10^6).
There’s more numbers that have to be blocked off too.
You can’t have 911-1111 being a valid number, so there goes another 10,000. Same goes for 411, 555, and probably even more 3 digit prefixes.
April 20, 2008 at 11:33 am
And there are often a lot more used phone numbers than there are people in a given state. In the Bad Old Days of dial-up ISPs, you might have one business using 50 phone lines, each of which would have had a separate billable phone number. (This in the days before Telco provided local PBX multiplexers.)
But, even without that huge drain, you get a lot of people using more than one phone number. The last place I lived before I moved in with my fiancee (now wife) has three people living in it who owned cell phones, and we still had a hard wired land line. Businesses still have multiple phone numbers, and frequently the owner will have a “work” cell phone.
NH has an estimated population of 1.3 mil, NM has a slightly higher population of 1.9 mil, but we have two area codes. I would not be surprised to find out that NH telcos are already planning for how to do a switchover to an additional area code.
April 21, 2008 at 12:02 pm
There are many numbers that are reserverd. The North American Dialing Plan uses the format of NPA-Nxx-xxxx. The “x” can be replaced with any number 0-9. The remaining Nxx has limitations. Some are reserved, such as 911/711/311/211. Also there is a specific format for area codes.
The long and short of it is that in some metro areas, all the numbers for area code have been used. It’s not uncommon for a given geographic area to be served by TWO area codes, one overlays the other.
April 21, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Yup. Metro Atlanta went to ten digit phone numbers back in in the mid ’90s.
404 was all of North Georgia, then it shrunk to inside I-285, then it lost geographical significance altogether when the newest overlay area code went into effect.
Incidentally, businesses in the city center will pay premiums to get “404″ area code numbers, since that implies longevity.
April 27, 2008 at 12:50 am
There are huge blocks of numbers set aside for various reasons that essentially can not be used. That brings the numbers down from the mathmetical high to something where numbers can, and do, run out. Here in Michigan we use 10 digit dailing in most of the Detroit suburbs. What once had one area code now has four or five (depending on how you count). Cell numbers, modems, faxes, etc, just add to the rate that the telecos are using up numbers. Expect 10 digit dailing to spread to more and more areas.