The spam is rising. I’m going to have to go through and block a lot of unwanted email sources.
This one isn’t too bad, but it set me back for a moment: Phone numbers used to start with letters. Oh yeah? That’s news? The first phone number I learned was UL2-6652, my home phone. And yeah, we also memorized phone numbers, something we also don’t do anymore.
My girlfriend’s phone number was 852-1177 (learned after the letter convention was abandoned). Another curse I have is that stuff I memorized as a kid still floats around in my head — I’d try calling her up again, but she lives in the house with me now, and I haven’t memorized her current number.
I also get lots of email from Donald Trump, which I don’t mind — please do waste a few pennies on me, I’ll never ever vote for you. The annoying one is PragerU, which sends me spam every fucking day, and now they’re sending me postal mail.
It’s a fundraising letter, of course, but also, annoyingly, it doesn’t actually give the reason why Charlie Kirk dedicated his upcoming book to Dennis Prager
. The book is some pious claptrap about keeping the Sabbath, which smarmy ol’ Prager agrees with, but that’s about it…so send him $35, $50, or $70 for some reason or other.
Mainly, though, it’s clear that PragerU has an absurd amount of money that they’re spending on outreach, and they’re busy capitalizing on Kirk’s bloody death. Ghouls, all of them.
My girlfriend’s phone number was 867-5309.
She was so easy, they broadcast her phone number everywhere.
I know, my home address is on there, but I don’t care. Better they send their garbage to me, who will never support them, then to all the vulnerable, gullible seniors they’re actually targeting.
What? You’re not interested in having a 9-inch banana?
4-22-36…my high school locker combination from 1966 to 1970. I still have the lock in my nightstand drawer. And my former locker partner sleeps on the other side of the bed.
Whenever I get postal mail like this I always open it to see if it comes with a postage paid return envelope. If it does, I remove my name and address from the paperwork, stuff it all into the return envelope, and mail it back to them. It costs them a few cents, takes up some of their time on the receiving end, and gives a little extra business to the US Postal Service. Winning all around.
Otherwise, straight into the recycling bin.
Good idea. This one does have a paid postage return envelope.
I’ll have to think about what to send them. It won’t be money.
Wasn’t there a sceptical magazine who had a problem with Christians using their paid postage mail to send them heavy things like bricks or stones to increase the cost?
Law Stack Exchange is on it:
Can I tape a prepaid envelope to a brick and post it?
Hickory 4-9992. I still recall that from my childhood. You probably have to be at least 60 to have memorized a number like that. We moved in 1972, and I don’t recall memorizing an exchange name for that house (of course, I don’t remember that number at all, though my then-GF-now-spouse still does, because she called it a lot).
UN1-0849
Locked in there forever. I have since forgotten the 4-5 phone numbers I had subsequently.
I guess you never forget your first Number.
Merchant, Matthews, Grey, Chesea, Sheffield, McGuffin – Elementary school teachers First through Sixth grades at Riverside Elementary. Jeeze, taking up space where some good porn should be!
Millvale 1-1619J. The J being for the party line, I guess. Later it was Taylor 1-3329 and finally 412-821-3329.
Tis news to me..
( Allusion to : https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/brave-new-world/ )
Reckon both Miranda and Prospero are correct. Both necessary even too. Though neither ever used telephones plus are fictional. Anyhow..
I don’t remember the whole number but my first home phone number from the early 50s started “Elgin 395…” or “EL395”. We moved in 1956 and our new phone number was “Poplar” or PO52925…
Remember when you could tell where someone lived by their phone’s area code: 415 San Francisco, 408 San Jose, 213 LA, 904 North Florida. Now that’s kind of going away. My phone has a 408 area code because the number came with a business phone. I never lived in the 408 area code, and though I have the same phone number it’s now my personal phone.
Sadly, I didn’t have a girl friend in high school. I was a nerdy loner with hardly any friends. Still kind of true.
I have a difficult time remembering almost anything, but I have to practice my wife’s phone number (I need the last 4 digits to pick up orders sometimes). Fortunately our son’s phone is almost the same.
Sometimes I happen to be out front when the mail person pulls up to at the end of the driveway. Many times everything he hands me goes straight to the trash bin which is near by. We laugh at the irony.
@ ^ Ironically this and thr OP here makes me feel; less old.
Tho’my back and body generall;y too often doesn’t help.. & hurts.
Never felt any age really – just been me throughout my life.
BR-549
355
Girlfriend’s phone from early 70’s: IV2-3266. The most important number to me at the time.
Home phone from the 50’s: LE9-5030.
@15 With ever more memories and less health..
How about sending them something symbolic like dead cockroaches?
Downsides:
1) First you have to catch some.
2) Kill them in some way leaving them intact.
3) Might be illegal.
4) Probably too subtle for the Prager U femto-wits to figure out/
WHI 1212. Whitehall 1212 was the direct line to Scotland Yard. (headquarters of the Metropolitan Police). Mind how you go!
Why not stuff the rubbish from one lot into another’s reply paid envelope?
Nah, I’m only 50 and 895-5410 is forever burned into my brain.
The book is some pious claptrap about keeping the Sabbath, which smarmy ol’ Prager agrees with, but that’s about it…so send him $35, $50, or $70 for some reason or other.
As long as the check isn’t dated on a Sabbath, it’s all good.
Send them some dessicated mealworm carcasses.
Over time, as the number of phones increased, it was inevitable that the phone numbers would get longer. Before I was a kid, I understand that most US numbers were 5 digits (the first two as letters, as in the infamous “BR-549”). This was then expanded to a 3 digit prefix (exchange) with four digits following, as in SW7-6111 (SW pronounced as “SWift”). This was the number for a local bank’s time & temperature service back in the 60s.
Here’s the cool part: if your exchange was the same as the party you’re calling (e.g., they were both SW7) you could just dial the last four digits (I don’t know when they stopped this). I live in an area where they created an “area code overlay” several years ago because they were running out of numbers. The same geographical area now had two area codes. End result, ever since then I’ve always had to dial 10 digits, even if the area code and exchange are the same as mine. The original area code still dominates, and it is normal practice that people who have that area code don’t say it when asked for their phone number. At least that’s true among Boomers.
U9064
My Dad’s licence plate in 1952.
And I still remember postal codes from the 1980s. And old friends’ phone numbers.
Sheesh! I grew up with my family served by a hand-cranked phone and a party line. We moved to the BIG CITY when I was seven; my home’s phone # was 873-4395. That’s well over sixty year ago (sob)!
A couple of days ago I came across my old work phone number. Even though I’d had that number for 23 years and had quit that job just five years ago, I looked at it and considered it and still couldn’t be sure I recognised it. It was only the context which convinced me it was the correct one.
My phone is there to receive machine-generated calls from spammers several times a day.
Phones are a bit of an artifact nowadays. They are the expensive, patent-encumbered portion of a mobile device’s two-way radio chipset that people my age would rather not use — give me an internet connection and let me generate practically endless amounts of cryptographic keys instead of phone numbers for my primarily text-based communications, thank you.
My phone number in the 1940s and 50s in Bath, Maine was 1411 and you had to speak it to an operator.
Technology!
I gotta hand it to P.U. marketing. Old fashioned junk mail can light up the nostalgic parts of Old Farts brain.
Also too. Take the return envelope and glue it to a brick then send it back. P.U. will pay the freight. (This of course may be an Urban Myth.)
I’m just a bit too young to have lived through the era of letters in phone numbers. They were really only ever a thing in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester (where local numbers were 7 figures long, and presented as a group of three — formerly letters, with a mnemonic word such as MUSeum — and a group of four); and by the time STD went nationwide, those cities had moved to “all-figure numbers”. In my time at Aston University in the early 90s, I saw a few shop fascias still bearing numbers written in the old style, such as EAS 0817 in Erdington (for EAStern 0817; by then 021-327-0817, eventually to become 0121-327-0817) and SPR 2303 (SPRingfield = 777) in Sparkhill. Note that in some of the original 7-figure cities, some prefixes changed when numbers went to all-figures. Numbers in Handsworth used to begin with NOR for NORthern, but that changed to 554. This was around the time of the introduction of system X / system Y, but 440 numbers were still handled by a clicky-clicky Strowger exchange until about 1994.
We had 4-figure numbers in Etwall, though, when many villages had only 3-figure numbers. Now you have to dial the full STD code even to call a number in the same town. Of course many people have mobile phones, which of course have their own STD codes beginning 07; and since the introduction of mobile number portability, the code does not even tell you which phone company a user is with. (With the first VHF mobiles in the 1980s, you had to dial a different STD code depending where roughly in the country the person was, followed by their mobile number!) Not that you even have to remember phone numbers anymore, since all mobiles have what used to be called “speed dial” …..
Hard to go past Glitter for sheer annoyance potential.