All Hung Up Over an Area Code

Some people live by the book, others by the numbers. For the second category, the creation of a new telephone area code out of venerable old 213 seems to have caused some trauma. After all, many in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys felt rejected when they were kicked out of 213 in 1984.

When Pacific Bell and General Telephone announced last week that the entire Los Angeles County coast would be carved into a new 310 area code beginning in 1992, the search began for social reasons or psychological consequences. What would it mean for Malibu and San Pedro both to be in this new sub-state? What was the political fallout of dividing West Hollywood between the two code areas?

Patient telephone company personnel explained that the split was done purely of the numbers, by the numbers and for the numbers, with no discrimination intended. The technological explosion has outrun available digits. No one anticipated having to create a new area this soon, but the phenomenon of fax machines, paging devices and cellular telephones ate up numbers like a hungry Pac-Man. Pacific Bell cannot tell how many lines are devoted to fax machines, but there are 258,000 cellular phones now in use and paging devices have consumed 42 prefixes.

If any Southlanders feel slighted by being turned out of good ol’ 213, consider Oakland and the rest of eastern San Francisco Bay. They are being ejected from sophisticated 415 and given a 510 area of their own in 1991. Gertrude Stein’s great line about Oakland will have to go. Now there is a there, there.