New Area Code

Can’t you hear the telephone companies snickering as you repeat their phony excuse for the area-code split (Oct. 28)? It’s not cellular phones, pagers or fax machines causing the split; it’s seven-digit numbers for office phones. Remember how a business or other big organization used to have a “main number” and then you would ask for or punch in an extension number? Well, they all have nifty “direct dial” extensions now and those are taking up millions of regular numbers!

Thanks to “direct inward dialing” (DID) giving every office phone a regular number, we are going to have to dial 11 digits instead of seven to talk to a friend or order a pizza. The collective time wasted by Angelenos for all this extra dialing (and the extra mistakes!) will add up to millions of hours (and billions of dollars) every year. (Leaving out the cost of new stationery.)

To solve this problem we should abolish DID extensions and go back to the old phone-number plus extension-number system. It wouldn’t be very costly--modern PBXs don’t need operators because you can dial the extension. But whatever we do, we should recognize the source of the problem--it’s not cellular phones and pagers, it’s office extensions!

MARK SEECOF, Santa Monica