4271

Just had a phone call from Gloria, the office administrator of the Public Transportation Section. The caller id said 2471, and I was taken back in time to about 25 years ago, when the land line telephone had just been introduced to our little town. Grandpa bought one of these old-fashioned phones with the finger dialing gadget and all that antiquity features! The number that was assigned to our household was 4271. Those days, you wouldn’t need to dial a 7-digit number to call anyone in town; only four digits would suffice; although, if you wanted to call out of town, you would have to add another three digits to the beginning of it, which were 648, and this was when you wanted to call within your district, and if you wanted to call someone outside your residing district, you had to dial another 3-digit number preceding all the seven numbers suffixing a zero, which was 0-142. So, these numbers are somehow carved into the wall of my memory and would never drop into my subconscious!

Another trigger to this whole “wonder” is when I wanted to reference the coordinator of the course I used to teach at Missouri S&T, the IDE 120 – Materials Testing, Dr. Jeffery Thomas. His office phone number was the same as our first phone number, 4271, and I didn’t even need to dial the 341 for university internal calls, and that was nice too. Calling from outside the university, though, I had to first dial the area code 573 and then 341-4271.

And now, Gloria’s phone number is 2471, and if I want to call the department from outside I will have to first dial the area code 501 and then 569-2471. Nice and interesting resemblance and another little trivia of life, which I enjoy noticing. It’s kind of a thing some people may have like this friend I had at Missouri S&T, Maryam Abdi. I hope she is doing alright, she was/is a bright kid and I wish the best for her. But anyway, one day we were studying or drinking coffee or something at Panera that she mentioned how she notices a combination of the three numbers 1, 3, and 5 in a lot of instances through different uses, in the number plates of cars, telephone numbers in billboard advertisements, some engineering constants in her books, etc. and she also showed me an occurrence right then, which I don’t remember what it was. Then she asked me if I had such an observation of numbers anytime, and well no I had never noticed anything like that. Well that was somehow interesting too, a little trivia in one’s analytical mind to generate patterns through random observations in her personal “world of ideas”.

Isn’t this cool to have something foolishly interesting?!