The Phony Phone Number Shortage

Maybe it was just the way little things will get to you. Maybe it was the way the hassles seemed to materialize overnight. Maybe it was the sour whiff of bureaucratic baloney. Whatever. For reasons coming soon enough to the rest of California, all heck is breaking loose on Los Angeles’ Westside.

Yelling. Cussing. Lobbying. Journalistic rabble-rousing. (“Power to the people!” exhorted columnist Robert Scheer in the local Our Times, which circulates with this paper in Santa Monica.) At issue: The #&#*%&% phone companies with their #&#*%&% new area code overlay that, for weeks now, has forced everyone in the 310 area code to punch in 11 digits every time they call someone--even someone whose number starts with 310.

I’ll explain overlays in a moment. After all, unless the Westside situation is reversed within the next two months, when it becomes permanent, it will be only a matter of time before we’re all “overlaid,” as it were. But first, some testimonials from the folks who were picked by the state’s Public Utilities Commission to pioneer this area code frontier:

“You just want to wring somebody’s neck!”

--Dr. Steve Teitelbaum, Santa Monica plastic surgeon.

“It’s logistically insane!”

--Joshua Fouts, Culver City online journalist.

There’s more. Unfortunately, most of it is in language that this, a family newspaper, cannot print.

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The area code situation is a familiar story to anyone with a telephone: Once, there were only a few area codes. Then God created faxes and modems and pagers and soon we ran out of numbers. And thus did the high jinks begin.

This is the line everyone has bought into as area codes have burgeoned. But what if it turned out that there was more to it than, say, the “Message from GTE” that went out to Westside homes this winter, beginning, “Because new telephone numbers are once again growing scarce. . . .”

What if California had some 180 million phone numbers, according to the PUC, and only about 35 million were being used?

This is the truth that has created such hubbub. Turns out that, yes, part of the “scarcity” is the high demand for numbers, but a bigger part involves the way phone numbers--which are public property, like radio bandwidths--get doled out. The gist is that the independent entity that distributes numbers to phone companies hands them out in blocks of 10,000 that can’t be broken. This was fine when there were only a couple of phone companies, but California has 190 phone companies now.

Vast quantities of the available numbers are with the larger, older companies, which typically will use a few thousand numbers in a block and sit on the rest. The upshot is huge demand and tons of unused numbers which, for obvious reasons, the bigger phone companies want to hang onto. And the Federal Communications Commission won’t force them to share.

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Hence, the Westside situation. Until last month, when a new area code was added, it was done by splitting an old area code in two. This was expensive and disruptive for small businesses, and increasingly hard to do as the areas involved got smaller. So this time, the 310 area code was “overlaid” with a new area code, 424.

In July, new phone lines will get the new area code, even if the new phone is a second line in a 310 house. And, so neither area code will suffer more, the PUC has insisted since last month that everyone dial as if the call were long distance, even if it’s in the same area code.

This has people in an uproar, and I don’t blame them. Nor does Assemblyman Wally Knox (D-Los Angeles), who is pushing a bill (AB 818) that would pressure the FCC to force the phone companies to pool unused numbers. Nor does the PUC chairman, who is lobbying the FCC not only for pooling but for the right to give, say, modems and pagers their own area code.

Nor does columnist Scheer, who got so mad he went on a crusade in Our Times, prompting thousands of Santa Monicans to deluge Sacramento with calls and faxes. Were it not for that pressure, some legislators said, industry lobbyists surely would have deep-sixed Knox’s bill.

Nor should you shy away from the chorus. Inconvenience is one thing, but there’s something galling about knocking yourself out just to please some phone company. So call your congresspeople. Let the FCC know we’re ready to reach out and slap somebody. Because the experts tell me that once the Westside goes permanent July 17, it’ll be 11 digits for everyone. Look out Orange County, San Diego, Long Beach. . . .

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.