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Hold the Phone--Why Should She Get Our 805?

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We’re sisters, yet we’re the best of friends.

Really!

So if Santa Barbara gets to keep the Eight Oh Five area code while we’re assigned three drab, what-was-that-number-again kind of numbers, we wouldn’t feel the slightest twinge of envy.

Really!

Oh, sure, it would be hard to change. We’ve shared Eight Oh Five with Santa Barbara since 1957. San Luis Obispo also got in on the act, but we’re not talking about San Luis Obispo right now, not by a long shot.

This is between us and Santa Barbara, and who could imagine a better sister than Santa (“Pretty Is as Pretty Does”) Barbara?

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So pretty!

But we’re not jealous of all the ga-ga gaping from the tourists, because Santa Barbara deserves every last bit of it. Millionaires flock to her like wolves to a lamb chop, so she can afford certain--well, enhancements. It must be nice to have fancy department stores and lovely parks and landscaped freeways and haciendas lifted from a banana republic, and those look just perfect on Santa Barbara.

Really!

As for us, we like to think we’ve aged even more gracefully than our sister on the gold part of the Gold Coast. Yes, our subdivisions have spread some (don’t you hate that “sprawl” word?) and our arterials have thickened. Times change, but we figured that the one thing we’d have forever, loyal as a Boy Scout, is our area code.

“We’ll always have Paris,” they say in the movies.

“We’ll always have Eight Oh Five,” we said here in Ventura County.

But we’re reasonable. If every family has one phone line for mom and stepdad, another line so Tiffany and Ryan can keep in touch with Dad No. 1 and Stepmom No. 2, and two other lines for the family computers--plus cell phones, fax machines and beepers--well, it doesn’t take the math department at UC (“Not Cal State!”) Santa Barbara to tell you what will happen.

You need more area codes. Really!

And that’s exactly what will happen. The word is already out from something called the North American Numbering Plan Administration: In the next two years, the state will split the area covered by Dear Old Eight Oh Five. Either we’ll get it or Santa Barbara will get it--just like she’s always gotten everything!

Sorry.

But when we sit here in our cloth coat and sensible shoes, watching the tourists whiz north on the 101 to Prettyville, where the people are trim and healthy and wear brilliant “Tennis, anyone?” smiles . . . well, we just get to feeling a little blue, that’s all.

So if Santa Barbara gets to keep the heirloom Eight Oh Five and we have to grin and accept the one dumped on us by some bureaucrat who probably once was positively awe-struck when he went to an area code conference up at the Biltmore, that would just be typical.

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And we wouldn’t resent it one tiny bit.

Really!

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.

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