The ubiquity of cell phones has caused people to stop memorizing phone numbers. Scroll through a list of names or start typing their first name, and you can be calling a person in seconds.
Many of my students didn’t know a single phone number.
In fact, as part of a basic skills test I gave kids every year, I insisted they learn their parents’ phone numbers.
Many did not even know that number.
It led me to wonder what phone numbers I still know or can recall.
There was a time when I knew the phone numbers of most of my friends and many of my family members.
Dozens, I’d guess.
Today there aren’t nearly as many, and most of them are vestiges from a time before cell phones.
- The phone number attached to my childhood home (defunct)
- My aunt and uncle’s home number (still operational)
- My grandparents’ phone number (defunct)
- The phone number for Ideal Pizza in Blackstone, MA (still in operation)
- My friend and Scoutmaster’s phone number from childhood (defunct)
- Peter Archambault’s childhood home (defunct)
- David Dunne’s childhood home (defunct)
- The phone number attached to my first apartment in Attleboro, MA (defunct)
- The phone number of the Milford, MA McDonald’s where I once worked (still in operation)
- The home phone number of my best friend’s parents in Milford, MA (still in operation)
- The phone number attached to my first apartment in Connecticut (defunct)
- The phone number attached to my first home in Connecticut (defunct)
- The phone number of the Hartford, CT McDonald’s where I once worked (still in operation)
- My father’s phone number (still in operation)
- My friend Jeff’s phone number, which I use when renting golf carts in case I don’t return one someday (still in operation)
- My wife’s cellular phone number (still in operation)
- My own cellular phone number (still in operation)
That’s it.
Not many.
I don’t even include my children’s cell phone numbers on the list because I often have to look them up.
When I told my students that I once had dozens of phone numbers memorized (as a way of berating them when they didn’t memorize their multiplication facts), they found it incomprehensible.
Dozens of ten-digit combinations? They couldn’t believe it.
I almost can’t believe it, either.
