The town was so small that there weren’t enough houses and businesses to even use an entire prefix.
You know of course that a phone number is made up of 10 digits. The first three digits are the area code, that was used to help the old phone company computers understand where to route the call. You see, the phone network back then was a large collections of medium sized Area Systems. An area system would provide services to up to an entire state and more depending on the number of phones. That area system was a single “Area Code”, the first three digits.
And each Area System was broken down into a number of local systems. Each local system originally had only one Prefix (the next three digits in a phone number). Because some people didn’t have phones, and hardly anyone had more than one phone, so only one phone number.
No faxes back then. No Internet connections. No cell phones.
Each local system could support a maximum of 10,000 phones.
The town I was born in didn’t have that many.
So for the first ten or twelve years, every phone in town started with the same three numbers. In our case, 447. Right around 1970 the town had finally grown large enough that the local Ma Bell decided they needed to expand the local system. When they did, someone made a logical, but strategically poor decision. They added 443 as the next prefix in the area.
This caused no end of confusion in town for a while. I mean everyone who had been in town for any length of time, well, their fingers just naturally dialed out 447 when they started dialing a phone number. Of course, if the number they were trying to dial was new, and thus 443, they actually got connected to a 447 number by “mistake”. I remember many adults being frustrated with the new phone numbers until their heads and fingers got back in sync.
My brothers and I were frustrated too. Frustrated as only three teenage males can be.
One late Spring Friday night, shortly after the new prefix had been added, our parents were off playing Bridge with their friends, and my brothers and I were home alone. Left with my eldest brother “in charge”. The second poor decision that lead to the upcoming travesty.
My brothers and I were down in the basement watching F-Troop on TV when the phone rang. Well, that started a free-for all (as most things did back then) with the three of us all racing to get up the steep narrow stairs and into the kitchen first so that we could answer the phone.
I am sure that bruises were involved, and wouldn’t be surprised to know that blood flowed either.
Well, it turned out some fool had miss dialed and called our house in an effort to reach the newest pizza parlor in town to order a pizza.
Frustrating.
Not that we hadn’t enjoyed the fight across the basement floor, the general trampling that occurred on the stairs, setting the kitchen table and chairs back upright, and re-gluing the tile knocked loose from the counters, but, the call hadn’t even been for us.
After glumly clumping back down to the basement and setting in front of the TV again, the phone rang a second time.
More bruises were collected.
More blood was shed.
My memory tells me that in that first Friday night, we got several such misdialed phone calls.
Saturday night was the same. A few Sunday, and then hardly any more…..until the following Friday.
Another Bridge night. Parents gone again. Brothers and I watching F-Troop on TV. Phone ringing.
Bruises.
Blood.
Yep, we boys developed a short fuse when it came to those pizza calls.
Looking back, it is relatively obvious of course that we could have chosen to ignore Friday night and Saturday night phone calls…..but then this wouldn’t be much of a story, would it?
I can’t tell you who to blame. I know it had to be one of the three of use boys, since we were after all the only ones home. A line of reasoning that Mom and Dad fell back on often as I recall.
And I am sure that I was much too polite, kind, and generous for it to have been me. So I am going to arbitrarily blame Barry.
After-all, Mom and Dad had left him “in-charge”.
Of course, there are any number of elderly childless spinster ladies today that used to ply their trade as teenage babysitters back in the day who will enthusiastically tell you that being “in charge” of my brothers and I was akin to tossing three angry ally cats in a single gunny sac and trying to keep them apart at the same time.
In any case, since we have all come to agreement that we are going to blame Barry; Barry answered the phone only to hear someone ask to order a pizza….AND HE POLITELY TOOK THEIR ORDER!
I stood there with my mouth hanging open. Barry thanked them, told them that the pizza would be ready for pickup in 20 minutes and hung up.
I remember asking him; “What happens when it isn’t ready”. To which he said; “What do we care, they will be at the counter then, not here”.
Well, that was the beginning. And the beginning of the end as it turned out, though my brothers and I never considered it. After-all, our only thought was we were getting “even” with the people who couldn’t even dial their phones right.
Call after call, we politely took orders, suggested add on sales, and promised pickup times.
Funny thing, in a town that only ever saw one or two snow flurries in the 20 years that I lived there, things kinda snowballed from that point on.
It wasn’t too long before someone (okay, someone on our end of the phone call) offered our new pizza delivery service. Promising that if the pizza wasn’t in the customer’s hands in 35 minutes or less, it would be free.
It’s amazing, really, how many home deliveries you can promise to people before the first person’s patience runs out and they call back irate that their pizza hasn’t arrived.
It’s even more amazing how apologetic an irate person gets when they think they messed up dialing the phone.
But, before you think too badly about us, we didn’t keep that up for very long.
But before you give us too much credit;
I suppose I should admit that the pizza parlor didn‘t last out the summer.
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2014, Marty K Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved
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