Thursday, July 12, 2012: The "Lily Tomlin" Edition

Lily Tomlin is probably one of the greatest comedic actresses of all time, and one of her most beloved characters was Ernestine, the pushy, rude and power hungry telephone operator.

I mention her because today's edition of TELEPHONE WEEK, which is mostly focused on phone numbers.

And, no, we won't be doing 867-5309.

Ernestine harks back to a time when you could get real people on the phone at the phone company.  And, usually, they were more helpful in real life then Ms Tomlin's creation - though probably not by much.  And those real people helped you dial wholly different phone numbers than we use today, mostly because of the old telephone name exchange system. This utilized exchange names to distinguish identical numerics for different customers.

How it worked was that first two or three numbers of the phone number were exchanged for letters of the exchange name, followed by the numeric digits. That's how the number for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City changes from the rather bland 736-5000, to the far more romantic and evocative Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand.

Or how the Marvelettes end up calling Beechwood 4-5789. Or simply dialing BUtterfield 8 if you wanted to chat with the sultry Elizabeth Taylor.

Yes, phone numbers, like pretty much everything else, were a lot better back then.  As opposed 911.

Which, according to Flavor Flav, is just a joke. But not a funny Lily Tomlin joke.