Do “555″ Numbers on TV Bother You Too?
Jan 20th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 7 Comments |
The Wife and I were watching an episode of Cold Case, when Detective Rush says her cell number is “555-. . .” (I don’t remember the rest).
Back in my day, if you wanted “Information” you called “555-1212″ (with the area code of the number you’re looking for). Evidently nowadays you can call “411.” But I’ve always been under the impression that “555-1212″ was the only 555 number. (I could be wrong.)
They always use 555 numbers in movies and TV shows, so viewers won’t crank call the number later and bother a real person. But it completely breaks the “suspension of disbelief” for me. *sigh*
Bell owns all of the “555″ numbers. That’s because back when people couldn’t be trusted to remember more than five digits at a time, they would be given phone numbers like “Greenfields 14157.” That would actually be 971-4157, with the 9-7 being the G-r of “Greenfields”. The letters on the 5 are J, K, and L. Since not too many English placenames start with those letters in succession, Bell appropriated “555″ for its own use.
I am given to understand that you can always reach someone (ie, a Bell person) by dialing a 555 number, although I have not tried it myself. So you can just pretend that everyone in TV land moonlights at the phone company, if that makes things easier for you.
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I’m sorry Micah. I realize how many phone things are annoying for you. ;)
I wonder, though, how many people called 867-5309 and asked for Jenny….
:)
Yeah, there’s really just nothing they can do. I seem to recall that they wound up with a real number as the number that God used to page Bruce in Bruce Almighty, and I remember it being a story where someone got harassed because of it.
I suppose it would work better if they could reserve certain numbers across a number of exchanges over all area codes, but, too late for that now.
I was watching “Sky High” with my kids the other day. The bus driver in the movie passes his business card to the main character. Interestingly, they had his thumb positioned over the prefix of the phone number, presumably to avoid that annoying jolt of noticing the 555… Ironically, I was still jolted out of my suspension of disbelief by noticing how they avoided showing the number.
I wonder if anybody has thought about commercializing this… There must be somebody who’d pay to have their phone number play some crucial roll in a movie and then hope for prank calls so that they can try and sell stuff to the callers.
Jeff, there are some movies and TV shows (the TV show 24 most notably) which have given real phone numbers issued to members of their staff. This phone number is then used basically to advertise the show.
As reality invoking as the movie 555 numbers are, at least I’m used to them. I’m so conditioned that if I saw a real phone number I would spend the next several minutes pondering their absence.