Now I Know Why...

No, I haven't discovered why the world exists, or why people have been waging war through times immemorial. What I have discovered (and this is tongue-in-cheek, because I certainly don't believe in this sort of predisposition stuff) is why I have always been fascinated by... telephone area codes.

November 10, 1951, which is the day I was born, was also the day when the mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, sat down in front of cameras and officials from AT&T and made the first user-dialed long distance area code in the U.S. (and I presume in the world) by dialing the 10 digits, starting with area code 415, for the mayor's office in Alameda, California.

Area codes had been designed in 1947, but for the first six years they were only used by long-distance operators to route the calls on behalf of the customers. This removed the need to connect to several intermediate operators (as many as 5) in order to build the entire route for the call. Instead, they could directly reach the recipient's local operator through numbers prefixed with one of 86 three-digit area codes.

The original area codes all had the pattern [2-9][0-1][1-9] for reasons that are best explained in the Wikipedia article on area codes. In recent years, after running out of area codes, the middle digit was allowed to be other than 0 or 1. But weird people like me had memorized quite a number of the old area codes: if you told me "212, 213, 214, 215" I might answer "New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia." To this day, this serves me as a mnemonic aid to remember my hotel room when I travel (without looking at the little envelope containing the plastic key): since most rooms in the U.S. have a three-digit number, and there are not often more than 20 rooms on a floor in a medium-size hotel, room numbers often match one of the old area codes. So if I am in room 404, I remember that I'm in the "Atlanta room," etc. It works very well (but again, I did say that I am weird).

Why did I finally discover this weird coincidence about my birthdate? I received a submission for a technical paper from someone whose phone number is in area code 416, and because this is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., I immediately suspected that this might be a Canadian area code (the original North America Numbering Plan, or NANP, covered the U.S. and Canada). I checked it, and found that it is indeed an area code for Toronto. But the Google search also returned the Wikipedia page, and the two-line summary in the results page showed the date of November 10, 1951, which caught my eye.

Nice coincidence!