As of September 19th, Californians will no longer be able to call a phone number to get the time-of-day spoken to them.
Which sounds goofy just even writing it, but I can recall calling the time-of-day number, back in the days when there were no computers, cell phones, digital timepieces that tied to the atomic clock by radio, or all those other services that will give you an Official Time. Want to be sure your clock was correct? You called time-of-day.
I don’t recall doing it much in California, but I do remember when we moved to Ft Collins in high school and we called the local number frequently to get the temperature.
The time: seven forty-five … from Mountain Bell … downtown temperature twenty-seven.
(Yeah, we were Californians — hearing about subfreezing temps was a cheap thrill.)
California was one of two states whose phone companies still provided the service (Nevada is the other), back from the AT&T / Cingular / Pacific Telesys / Pac Bell days. But the usage has dropped to nearly nil, and the equipment is breaking down.
On the bright side, it frees up about 300k phone numbers; the service was accessed by prefix, regardless of the last four digits, so all those numbers are now accessible.
Time marches on. But more quietly.
(via Les)