Our Days Are Numbered

I’ve been robbed.

I came home one day, and there it wasn’t.

Gone, missing, vanished beyond recovery.

I’d had it for years and years--for almost as long as I’ve had cleavage, when I think back that far. It meant a lot to me, too. And apart from the sentimental value, it was also just a handy little thing to have around. I miss it.

Like most thieves, this one didn’t bother to consider what I thought of his little larceny, but he left behind a piece of paper informing me arrogantly of what he’d taken, just in case I didn’t notice right off that something was missing.

I was surprised that he bothered. On the scale that this cutpurse operates, I am a very small victim indeed.

The thief was the telephone company.

And what he stole was a piece of my identity. My area code.

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On a rotary telephone, 213 is the second-fastest on the dial, after New York City’s 212. Back when they called us “the Coast,” it was the phone company’s way of acknowledging L.A. as the silver-medal city in America. No one was in that kind of hurry to call Anchorage, area code 907, three leisurely spins around the rotary dial.

For years, my 5- or 6-million neighbors and I lived cozily in our 213 territory, from the desert to the sea to the Orange Curtain. Within 213, prefixes mapped out the geography. When I was teaching college, I could astound my students with this silly parlor trick: Tell me your phone number and I’ll tell you where you live. Oh, 465--how do you like Hollywood? 248--does it take long to get here from Glendale? 795--doesn’t all that Rose Bowl traffic bother you?

Then the 818 area code came along, giving the San Fernando Valley the satisfaction of seceding digitally if not territorially. Soon 310 surfed in, splitting off the beach-and-big-bucks corridors. From there, they began to blur--626, 562, 909. Still, I trudged on, under the 213 banner, loyally urban, echt Angelena.

And this summer, the numbers thief came calling on my street, making 213 into a three-mile downtown island and cutting me out, leaving me with a mockery of an area code--323.

I feel so . . . suburban. Someone, please--stop me before I barbecue again.

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What condemned us to dialing 11 digits to reach the corner grocery store?

The same phone industry that has been selling and selling--fax machines, car phones, cell phones, car faxes--and now protests itself surprised that people are buying and buying, and the phone numbers are running out and area codes filling up.

Where was that Alexander Graham Bell vision thing that could have avoided all this, by assigning new area codes only to those rootless cell phones and stateless pagers, not to houses and streets?

A conservative friend who just had his area code and his ZIP Code changed reads into this a conspiracy to levy long-distance rates every time we so much as order a pizza.

Maybe. Probably. But the higher cost is one more hit to our fragmented sense of community. Next year, the Valley will begin living a double life, in 818 and 424. At this rate those won’t be just page numbers in the Thomas Bros. guide--they’ll be area codes. At this rate my bedroom will have a different area code from my kitchen.

The phone company can begin to make it up to us.

Decades ago, the grandson of California’s populist reform governor Hiram Johnson founded the Anti-Digit Dialing League, a crusade against the phone company’s “dehumanizing” conversion of word prefixes into numbers.

You can still find those word prefixes, on flea-market telephones, in faded paint on the sides of old buildings, and in the recall of Angelenos. You called MAdison and RIchmond to reach downtown. SYcamore numbers rang in Alhambra.

This mangled, muddled mix of area codes would be more tolerable if the telephone company could restore that human scale, at least.

It would be too much to expect to have NObel assigned to Caltech and GOofy to Burbank’s Disney environs, but set a mathematician and a Scrabble player down at the same table and surely they could make magic with a telephone keypad. The 465 numbers could be HOllywood again. County government’s 974 prefix could be “XS,” as in excess, as in budget deficits--easy to remember if not flattering. And Los Angeles’ City Hall’s 485 could be assigned HUman, a reminder of what they are sometimes all too.

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Patt Morrison, whose column appears Wednesdays, writes today in the absence of Shawn Hubler, who is on vacation. Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.