I had the same cell phone number from January 1998 through Christmas 2005. It started with an Ericsson phone from a then-fledgling AT&T Wireless, offering me a discount on account of my employer. That number lasted me through half a dozen mailing addresses on two coasts, two different cellular providers, and more actual handsets than I’m comfortable remembering (though at a guess, I’d say there were at least a dozen). I can still rattle it off from memory; at times I have to think to remember it isn’t my current number. It was as much a part of my identity as my own name; my email address changed far more frequently.
Then Apple provided me with a phone and number. And I was faced with a choice. I could continue to carry two phones, or I could take the one work was providing me for free, and they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) port in my personal number…and I was confronted with the prospect of paying over $800 a year for data service and a 703 number. And I reluctantly accepted that I didn’t live in Northern Virginia anymore and gave it up. And I had my Apple number until I quit a year and a half later, at which time I acquired the number I had ever since…until today.
So yeah, I tend to hang onto a number for a while. That 650 cell number was my personal phone, even after I started working at a place that wanted to provide me a phone. Instead, they reimbursed my personal phone bill until around the end of 2012 – at which point I accepted their phone and ported my 650 number to Google Voice, and pointed it at their phone for two years until I replaced the phone, changed carriers, and ported it right back in. In any event, ringing or texting that 650 number has been a known good way to get hold of me since October 1, 2007…again, until today.
I don’t trust Google Voice. I think Google has a bad habit of launching things with a splash, making a big deal of them, promising the moon and stars, getting bored, forgetting about them, and eventually closing up shop in one of their periodic spring cleanings, sometimes with less notice than others. Wave, Buzz, Reader, the free Wi-Fi in Mountain View, Dodgeball, Latitude, iGoogle…the list is long and distinguished. So if you like Google Voice, or your Google Voice number, it might behoove you to get it out of there.
And I was tired of that 650 number. It was the product of what I now look back on as possibly the second biggest mistake of my entire life. The eight years I had it were not always the best of times. And that number had been compromised at work, fallen into the hands of more than one person who shouldn’t have had it. I have a new job now, a new role and a new title and (hopefully) a better and brighter future coming, and it was well time for a change.
People are funny about numbers. My wife, whose impatience with my phone shenanigans is the stuff of legend, has had the same cell phone number ever since she first got a mobile phone to track the birth of her oldest nephew (who just turned sixteen). But she insisted on that 415 area code back then, because it had disappeared out from under her on two separate occasions, and she was smart to pounce on it in the mobile sphere. Similarly, I have a burner phone lying around with a 205 number (largely held against the day I might need to port the ancestral home phone to it) plus a couple of disposable numbers still stashed in Google Voice against the possible need to give a phone number to someone I’d rather not have it. But for a permanent number, or at the very least, one that I’ll want until we switch to 14-digit dialing or Slack-over-VOIP or until this employer managed to screw me out of it? I wanted a number I could live with, a number I wouldn’t have any ambiguity or uncertainly about, a number that wouldn’t provoke unseemly anti-bubble feelings or a vague embarrassment about parts South. A number that reminded me of when I didn’t have any questions about who or what I was. A number that honors where this me was born and built.
I’m back on 703. Like other family of mine, wherever I find myself, I’m from the DMV. As free hiring perks/ self-made Christmas bonuses go, it’s as good as I could ask for. Normal service – whatever that means for me in 2016 – has been restored.