Area Code is the new Long Playing
Some of us remember owning round pieces of plastic with music scratched into them. We called them LPs, which originally stood for Long Playing. Area codes are going the way of Long Playing records. (Of course, CDs are going the way of LPs too, but that’s a whole different thought line.)
That means we have to re-think phone numbers: no more area codes, no more local exchanges, just strings of numbers that, when issued in sequence, make a connection between one device and another. Or is it a device? If you really rethink the whole telephone number, you have to end up thinking why the heck we have so many of them. The reason we have so many is that they are associated with devices, not people. Why don’t we each have one phone number? Why do we make the caller try to figure out which phone we’ll answer and then punish them if they don’t guess right?
I have one phone number, which started life as the number associated with one of my older cell phones. But I’ve ported it twice to new phones. And I’m now refusing to get another phone number. No “home” phone. No “business” phone. No “car” phone. Or any other phone: Sure, I have devices in all those places. And I have other phone numbers associated with those devices. But I don’t give those numbers to anyone I actually want or might want to talk to!
What’s really funny: I’ve filled out forms that called for multiple phone numbers. I only put one phone number down (choosing different fields to put it in each time) and sometimes my forms won’t be accepted unless I put in more phone numbers. The form isn’t correctly filled out if it doesn’t have enough phone numbers in it!
We’re in a transition. But sure as I have known anything in the past 25 years, I’ll tell you now that within the next 10 years, we will go back to having one phone number on our business cards. And we’ll rely on technology to give us the power to decide where phone calls go and which ones we take in real time.