I have lived full-time in Idyllwild for more than a year now — a short time compared to the multitude of wonderful “long-timers.”
I noticed right from the beginning that the Hill folk refer to their phone number as a four digit number (the last four of the rest of the world’s 10-digit number).
At first I thought it was quaint, and then it finally dawned on me, that if I had to dial up a shop, service, service group, or a friend that I had no idea what their prefix was.
I have a land line provided with my Time Warner Cable package and unlike all of the “long-timers,” my prefix is not 659, but rather 468.
My point to bringing this up is just to raise awareness so that those of you who have had their 659 numbers for eons, understand that we newbies don’t always get it.
Using a phone of any kind these days requires a minimum of 10 digits to dial, and often an additional digit — 1. So please consider using your entire phone number when you print it on rosters, ads, etc.
Thanks for your help to us newbies.
Susan Weisbart
Idyllwild
This habit of giving the last four digits of your phone number predates cell phones and goes back to the days when for local calls you only needed to dial 9 and the last four numbers. I believe that we were one of the last communities in Southern California to have 5 digit phone numbers.
Of course things have now changed with cable and cell phones and when you add to the mix the fact that our local area code has changed three times in the last 15 years. So i guess what i am trying to say is long term residents use the four digit numbers because they have been doing that for over thirty years and old habits die hard. So when you hear a four digit number you can simply add 951 659 -#### and you have it.