Bell Tolls for Grace Period as New Area Code Splits Bay Area on Monday : Telephones: The East Bay and San Francisco will soon be several digits farther apart.

Starting Monday, callers who want to reach out and touch someone across San Francisco Bay will have to stretch a bit.

That’s when the new 510 area code covering Oakland, Berkeley and other cities due east of San Francisco becomes final and callers who cruised through a five-month grace period have to start going by the numbers.

“I anticipate that there will be some frustration Monday,” said Pacific Bell spokesman Dick Fitzmaurice. “It’s one of those things that will take a while to get used to.”

The change for calls basically means dialing four extra digits, since there will be no additional charge to call across the bay.

The extra numbers do add up to more work--and cost for businesses, which had to update stationery and business cards and make sure customers knew their new number.

Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente, a health maintenance organization with 2.4 million members, had to prepare 30,000 Northern California employees for the change.

“The massive effort really has been education,” said spokeswoman Beverly Hayon. “One out of every three Northern Californians is a member of Kaiser Permanente and a large number of those live in the East Bay,” she said.

Still, Hayon said, the company is ready.

“Personally, I’ve been making an effort to dial the area code,” she said. “It’s one more little thing you’ve got to program into your brain.”

The new code brought some new business to area printers, although Craig Tanner, owner of Super Print Factory in Concord, said it appears the recession persuaded many businesses to wait to the last minute.

“They’re saying, ‘We’re going to use the very last bit of our stationery.’ I think it’s going to take not being functional to get people to change,” Tanner said.

“The economy is kind of sad right now,” agreed Richard Tom of the Print and Copy Factory in Walnut Creek. “People are just living with what they have until it runs out.”

The city of Oakland took advantage of the change to switch from an analog to a digital telephone system, said Steve Ferguson, the city’s director of corporate information services.

“We’ve been ready for a long time,” he said.

The need for more numbers stems from the proliferation of car phones, computer lines, multiple-phone homes and a generation that has faxed to the max. Telephone number duplications are possible after more than 7 million seven-digit combinations are assigned, with 30% reserved for emergencies.

The 510 split would leave only five unused area codes in North America. But a revised area code system adding 640 authorized 3-digit area code combinations to the existing 152 is due to arrive in mid-1995.

The new 510 code covers all telephones in Contra Costa and Alameda counties.

Last Nov. 2 in Southern California, the 213 area code spawned code 310 for areas to the south and west of downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood.