This Man’s Got Your Number : Due to the high demand for phone numbers, new area codes are replacing beloved old ones. Ronald Conners assigns them.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to call long distance, you dialed the operator. Her name was Mildred. Your telephone was as heavy as a bowling ball. “I am on long distance,” you said, and people hushed up, impressed. Your own phone number was something like TRemont 2-8795. Everyone remembers his first phone number, because it had a name and a personality. BUtterfield 8.

There was romance to the telephone then.

But in the late 1950s, Mildred lost her job. To call long distance, you merely had to dial a three-digit long-distance code. Suddenly DEcatur 2 became 332. The phone company never convincingly explained why. Pockets of protest formed; in San Francisco someone established the Anti-Digit Dialing League, to protest the dehumanizing change. But the league sputtered and fizzled, like a bad connection.

By the 1980s, technology had goose-stepped forward. No one was making songs like “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” anymore. When you called directory assistance, you spoke to a robot that demanded the information on its terms: city first, then name--and God forbid you should want an address.

This time, no grass-roots protest surfaced.

There was, at least, a constant: those area codes. Distant cities retained a sense of identity. Chicago was 312. San Francisco, 415. Los Angeles was 213. New York, 212. The numbers were familiar and somehow reassuring.

And then, about two years ago, things started changing again. There was an explosion of new area codes, and they did not resemble area codes you had ever seen. Worse, they replaced area codes that were familiar. Chicago was partitioned like Gaul; parts are now 773, other parts are 847, and still others 630. Atlanta was divided like Sherman only dreamed: Some neighborhoods remained 404, others became 770, others 678. Brooklyn, which was forever part of 212, became 718. Baltimore went from 301 to 410, and now, if your phone is new, you are 443. Your next-door neighbor can have a different area code from yours.

We have mislaid our sense of place.

Gone was the telltale 1 or 0 in the middle, a convention that reliably distinguished area code from phone number. Long-distance numbers have become a soup of digits, a minestrone without meaning. What kind of phone number is (678) 209-1894? It has become nearly impossible to remember a phone number.

Who did this to us?

I asked a directory assistance operator for “the phone company.” There is no phone company, she said. Hasn’t been since 1984, with the breakup of AT&T.; When I asked her name she gave me her “headset number.”

Eventually, I reached someone from AT&T; who disclosed that the phone company no longer allocates the area codes. “That is being administered by a private concern,” he said.

Your area codes are no longer being handed out by the phone company. Now they are being handed out by Lockheed Martin Inc., which makes warplanes.

The man in charge is Ronald Conners, director of the North American Numbering Plan Administration. He is an engineer who works for Lockheed.

To find him, I telephoned Lockheed, which is headquartered in Bethesda, Md., area code 301. The switchboard operator had never heard of Ronald Conners. She suggested I phone Lockheed’s Telecommunications office in Golden, Colo., which is area code 303. The Golden office had no record of Conners but sent me to the company’s Information Systems and Technologies office in King of Prussia, Pa., which is area code 610. King of Prussia suggested I try Lockheed’s Communications office in Marlton, N.J., which is area code 609. At Marlton, I got a pager number for someone named Jim, at area code 888. Jim sent me to Lockheed’s Information Management Services division in Teaneck, N.J., area code 201, where they knew Ronald Conners. They gave me his office number. It was in area code 202.

I phoned him.

“I’m across the street,” he said cheerfully. “I can see the Washington Post from my window.”

And so it was that I walked 70 feet across 15th Street Northwest to confront The Man With the Plan.

Not a Plot, but a Plan

The North American Numbering Plan is 50 years old this year. Its job is to distribute area codes nationwide. It is headquartered on the 12th floor of a nondescript building.

Ronald Conners, 57, looks soft and sincere--a little like Lyn Nofziger or Alfred Hitchcock. Many years ago, he worked for Bell Labs in Whippany, N.J., designing antiballistic missile systems. When he talks, he steeples his fingers professorially. He has been doing this phone number thing for 10 years or so.

Is the North American Numbering Plan part of a diabolical plot to sap Americans of their individuality and humanity?

“I would have to say no,” he says mildly.

It is simply a matter of arithmetic, he explains. Technology has created a terrific demand for phone numbers to accommodate our faxes, cell phones, beepers and those dedicated modem lines for our computers. Each area code allows only 7,920,000 possible phone numbers. Once, there were only 87 area codes. In 1994, there were 144. Now there are 197.

We need more. We have too many phones.

In other words, it is our fault.

“We’re running out of numbers,” Conners says. “What could we do?”

When area codes were initially handed out, the numbers were not random. The phone dial was in fact a dial. You placed a finger in the appropriate hole, rotated the dial clockwise until you hit the metal finger stop, and then let it snap back in place. On the snap-back, the digit you had dialed was entered as a series of clicks. Numbers containing large digits required more clicks and took longer to dial. The people who gave out the original area codes saw to it that the most frequently called cities got the numbers that were quickest to dial. Thus, New York got 212, L.A. got 213, Chicago, 312. If you were calling Anchorage, Alaska, however, you had to wait through the 26 clicks of 907. It made sense.

When touch-tone keypads replaced dials, all numbers took the same time and effort. Any combination of digits became as easy as any other.

A similar thing happened to typewriter keyboards, of course. With manual typewriters, it was necessary to place the most utilized keys physically apart so they did not keep jamming against each other: So the E and T and A and I were separated by less utilized letters, giving us the famous, quirky QWERTY keyboard. When electric typewriters replaced manual ones, it would have been possible to reconfigure the keyboard to make it more logical. Except no one did: It would have been too confusing for people.

With the phone company, it would seem, this has not been a concern.

Why are these new area codes so irritating?

“We are pushing the limits of memory span,” suggests Susan Resnick of the Gerontology Research Center at the National Institute on Aging. Most people can remember six or seven or even eight numbers in succession, she says. The old area codes were familiar and repetitive, and could be “chunked” as one bit of information. With 10 unfamiliar digits, the numbers can overwhelm us.

The new area codes have been heaped atop the implacable voicemail that replaced secretaries, the automated directory assistance that replaced operators and other bewildering robotics. Now, suddenly, the area codes you once knew are useless.

“It changes where we live, psychologically,” says James Katz, professor of communication at Rutgers University. Katz studies phone technology. Once, he lived and worked in the 201 area code. Then his work number was changed to the 908 area code. His home number remained 201, until it changed to 973. Now his work number is 732. All without moving or changing jobs.

“When we are assigned an area code we do not like,” he says, “it feels like a loss of place or position in society. It is one means of alienation. We are losing our sense of place.”

What about those old phone numbers with letter exchanges, like CYpress 9? Why can’t we return to those? Why did we ever change from that system?

Because, Conners explains, eliminating the letters greatly increased the number of three-digit exchanges, in part by making the 0 and the 1 available. Zero and 1 have no letter equivalents.

But for decades after the change, telephone exchanges never, ever had a zero or a one in the first two positions! Plus, any two-number combination can be reduced to a pleasant-sounding exchange. Admittedly, “JKL” and “WXY” require some creative writing, but what’s wrong with YPsilanti-9, or WLadislaw-6?

Lots of Leftovers

Eventually the truth comes out: We are not out of phone numbers.

There are plenty of unused phone numbers out there, millions of them. After the phone company was decentralized in 1984, competing carriers arose. Some were very small. They needed phone numbers to distribute to their new clients. The North American Numbering Plan gave out the numbers, one exchange at a time. An exchange was a package of 10,000 phone numbers, and you had to take them all, even if you didn’t have enough customers.

This was necessary, according to Conners, because the phone company’s switching equipment required the first six digits--the area code and the exchange--to identify the billing and routing of a call. It could not further subdivide the number without causing chaos. Unfortunately, this also resulted in many unused numbers. Millions of unused numbers. Conners talks of this as though it were inevitable.

This is like a supermarket selling marshmallows only in 40-pound bags and then lamenting that there are a lot of stale marshmallows out there in people’s homes.

Moreover, every state was entitled to its own area code, even though many states have nowhere near the demand for the 7.92 million telephones possible under one area code. Wyoming, for example, has 450,000 people. Its area code, 307, has millions of phone numbers lying fallow.

No one knows how many unused numbers there are, Conners admits; some estimates suggest there are as many unused as used.

Conners mentions that he has heard talk that someday we will each have only one phone number, a global phone number that follows you wherever you are: in your car, or your office, or your home, tracked by satellite, administered “by a database in Geneva or whatever.” He says he is not in favor of this.

He is not?

“I think people at some point will need their privacy. They will say, ‘I don’t want to be found.’ ”

Conners is silent for a moment. The former designer of antiballistic missile systems takes a lot of incoming flak these days.

“I used to have a full head of hair, before I entered the numbering business.”

And suddenly Ronald Conners, Master of the Plan, seems like just another guy. A nice guy who happens to look like Lyn Nofziger and administers the bureaucracy that is dragging a nation of cantankerous techno-junkies into a future they demand.

It is filled with numbers.