By GUEST COMMENTARY BY HILLARY ATKIN
An era ends today. This is the day when millions of residents of Western Los Angeles County must dial 1-310 before every telephone call in our area. It’s a sad day, one that is already filling me with dual feelings of annoyance and instant nostalgia for the simplicity of seven digits.
Perhaps it is akin to those days in the early 1960s when the last alpha numeric prefix disappeared. Does anyone long for the era of GLadstone 4, ALpine 7 or GRanite 8, when your phone number revealed your neighborhood, and with it, your socioeconomic class? For how long did people still recite those old exchanges when asked for their phone number?
These days an area code still defines something about you. The 310 is Santa Monica. It’s Culver City. It is Lawndale. West LA, Redondo Beach and Beverly Hills. Outside the boundaries of that gilded wedge that runs from Malibu to West Hollywood and back to Marina del Rey, no one wanted to give up their membership in the 310 club, as the phone companies kept banging the drum that they were running out of numbers and the shortage necessitated an overlay code.
I don’t believe it for a minute. And I’m also the person who as soon as 310 came into existence, switched my 213 cell phone — then a car phone, actually — so I would-n’t have to dial the extra digits. A person who gloried in not reciting my area code when giving a return number, unless I sensed any hesitation at the other end of the line. Ah, those good old days, years, are definitively over. From good-bye 213 to hello 310, all over again.
The titans of telecom were singing the same tune more than a decade ago when they claimed that the available supply of numbers was being eaten up at a rapid pace by the proliferation of fax numbers and pagers, which are now headed toward anob-solete heap. A grassroots effort of the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any-more” variety swept the influential Westside citizenry and a few key elected officials held off the dogs, whom it turned out were hoarding phone numbers in 10,000-number blocks.
But now it’s over. We’re being forced to succumb to greater powers who claim to have our telephonic best interests at heart. The same people who are the creators of countless area codes springing up in what was once the rarefied simplicity of 213-714- 818-land. Today, there are regional area codes you’ve never heard of unless you live in them.
Perhaps we 310-ers are among the last major metropolitan area holdouts to be so numerically spoiled. New York, which wisely years ago gave its cell phones a 917 overlay, went to 11-digit dialing in the 212 area code several years ago. There was a certain delight in knowing you were calling someone’s cell phone, a pleasure we will obviously not know here.
But here’s what will be obvious about the owner of a 424: You’re new and a numeric trailblazer. Come to think of it, I might have to be one of the first to enter the as yet uncharted territory. (Santa Monica resident Hillary Atkin has had the same 310 land line and cell phone numbers since 1992.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 26, 2006. Read the original PDF.