Who else remembers their childhood phone number but not the

[Floyd R. Turbo]

password they created yesterday?

[chicoescuela]

1. Guilty

[Floyd R. Turbo]

2. 🤗

[mucifer]

3. Yeah, I always have to reset passwords.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

6. 🤗

[OAITW r.2.0]

4. 284-8884

Easy to remember.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

7. 🤗

[rampartd]

15. sounds like an ambulance chasing lawyer

[True Dough]

5. Was my childhood phone number

867-5309?

That's the one that keeps running through my head!

[Floyd R. Turbo]

8. 🤔

[Xavier Breath]

18. Is that you, Jenny?

[True Dough]

33. From the block? Like JLo?

[elleng]

9. Main 5 65 21!!!

[Floyd R. Turbo]

11. 😃

[Sogo]

10. Hint: Make your next password your childhood phone number....

nt

[Floyd R. Turbo]

12. 🤗

[elleng]

13. GOOD idea!!!!!

[catchnrelease]

24. I've done that already!

I just have to remember which account it's for!!

[FemDemERA]

26. lol!

[virgdem]

14. Raises hand!

[fairfaxvadem]

16. Not only my childhood phone #...

But the #s of my best friends!!!

I use the last 4 digits of our old # as my hotel safe combo and a few other odds and ends, like my grocery store #. When I ever forget it, it's time for the memory-care unit.

[SalamanderSleeps]

17. B-R-549

Buck Owens had me on a string phone. You just had to keep the string taught. But, then we got on the party-line. Six families with everyone saying "Hello?" at the same time.

The rest is history.

[Faux pas]

19. Not me

I keep all my shady and secret stuff in my yahoo files.

[Dem2theMax]

20. I remember my childhood phone number. It started with WH.

Do I remember anyone's phone number today?



My phone remembers those for me. I have a secret place where all the passwords are kept. As long as I can remember where that thing is, I'll be okay.

[NNadir]

21. That would be me.

[Jeebo]

22. Ours was TRINITY 2-1575

Shortened to TR2-1575, in numbers that becomes 872-1575. That was in the late 1950s and 1960s. How many of y'all are old enough to remember those words that were shortened to two-letter prefixes on phone numbers? And rotary dial phones? I guess I must be old or something.

Passwords? I'm always forgetting them. I'm actually pretty good at coming up with passwords that I can remember — characters in my favorite novels and TV shows and movies and songs, names of pets and childhood friends, etc. — but the problem is, the rules seem almost to be designed to make it impossible to come up with a password that you can actually remember, and you have to have at least one number and one letter and sometimes a special character from a list, and sometimes they require you to change your password often, and a minimum required number of characters, and you can't re-use one of your 10 last passwords, and other rules, and so, you end up having to have so many passwords that you can't remember which one you actually used. The password itself might not be that hard to remember, is what I'm saying, but you've had to use so many of them with so many small alterations that the current one gets lost in the mass of passwords. And also the alphanumeric requirement — did I use a digit 0 instead of the letter o, or did I use a digit 1 instead of the letter l, to get my required number? It gets to where there are so many possibilities for the password you might have used that you can't remember which one.

We only ever had one telephone number when I was a kid, but there are so many passwords that it gets impossible to keep track of them all, even though they're a lot more recent than a phone number from 60-plus years ago.

— Ron

[Srkdqltr]

32. Texas-4-3023. Hubby's was - Avenue - something, something.

[dsvajda]

47. Ours was ...

I use the full telephone exchange name and number plus a few special characters as my password. Since we had two different exchanges and two different phone numbers, it works well for me. Until my memory finally fades.

[Skittles]

23. I moved every two years

so.....no

[mwooldri]

25. 010 353 4636677

Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s the area code for London was 01. The code for international dialing was 010. Long Wave Radio Atlantic 252 was based in Ireland. That one station covered NW Europe from a field north of Dublin. So the online DJs somehow emphasized the 01 part of the international dialing code to make it seem they were where they weren't . Until the middle of 1990, when the London code changed. Then they got themselves a London number.

Now how the heck do I remember that number but not my boys or my inlaws cellphone numbers? Probably because I don't have to dial them. That Irish number needed a stack of 10p coins and rotary dialling.

[dai13sy]

27. 7642 - and it was a party line. There were 6 other houses on our line

[mwooldri]

28. Childhood phone number was easy to remember

201 was mine at one point.

UK had village exchanges with 3 digit phone numbers. Area code was 6 digits long. Alas those 3 digit numbers are no more, the exchanges were modernized and linked in with other areas. After all, tone dialing had to be introduced and those mechanical exchanges with the purring cat as the dial tone had to go.

[WestMichRad]

29. Yeeup

Long term memory vs short term memory.

I can only remember what I ate yesterday when it rebels later, if ya know what I mean, but the blueberry pie at that picnic 50 years ago was awesome!

[crimycarny]

30. Anybody remember the "beep line"?

I grew up in the midwest and I remember something referred to as a "beep line" which was a number everyone could dial and there would be a constant beep--beep--beep, but in between the beeps you could call out your number and others could hear it and would call you (a teenager thing).

For example, my childhood number was 241-6860. I remember calling into the beep line and yelling out each individual number between the beeps:

Beep--2!--beep--4!--beep--1!--beep--6!---beep--8!---beep--6!--beep---0! We'd hang up and then our phone would ring with some stranger who was on the beep line and wrote down the number we screamed out between beeps. That, I guess, was our closest thing to an "internet", in that several people could be on the same line at once.

[AdamGG]

31. Remember my phone # from the 1970s and those of 5 or 6 friends

237-1127

[Pompoy]

34. Wow, I just remembered my neighbor's phone number in Greece 50 years ago.

We didn't have a phone, so that was the number I knew. Hadn't thought about it for decades, but as soon as I read this, it came right up.
99-22-*** .

Also the number we had here after we came in 1974 and had until 1998 and moved.

[Pompoy]

38. These days only mine and my wife's, not the son's and daughter's.

I rely on the cellphone for them.

[PufPuf23]

35. Vernon 7 -2628 later 837-2628 in late 1950s.

That was at family urban outpost in the SF Bay Area.

Real childhood home is in rural Humboldt County that did not have phones until 1969.

I do not register for things nor do too many things online because cannot keep track of passwords and frankly methods to wander and use the internet. I am old and demented.

[walkingman]

36. I guess I am older than most of those that replied....

Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2024, 12:06 AM - Edit history (1)

Or maybe because it was in a rural area??

But I remember in the middle 50s we would pick up the phone and wait for the operator to answer.

They/She would say “number please” and my Grandma's number was "105" and she would say “thank you” and the phone would ring.

We were on a party line and our ring was "2 rings".

As far as password - I use a password manager because way too many to remember....☮

[snacker]

48. Yes!

The party line and the operator are memories from my childhood too. Our number was 100W.

[snacker]

49. Yes

The party line and the operator are memories from my childhood too. Our number was 100W.

[hay rick]

37. I carefully write my passwords down on a piece of paper. Then I only have to remember where I put the piece of paper.

I remember my childhood phone number. It started with FRontier 7...

[Brother Buzz]

39. The password I created the other day was my childhood telephone number

[Midnight Writer]

57. Same here. My siblings and I use that number for lots of things.

That way we all know each other's codes.

[bobandrileysmom]

40. EL5-7442

[DallasNE]

41. 25 R 12

It was a party line where the 2 meant 2 shorts and longs were 5->9 so 1 long. Oh, there was a “rubberneck” where you could listen to other people’s calls without being heard.

[RockRaven]

42. My parents still have the same phone number as when I was a child...

And even though I don't need to dial numerically anymore I can still rattle it off at any time.

But as for yesterday's password... that is more like: Uh, what password?

[boonecreek]

43. BRunswick 8 5748

The other ones I remember were the police POlice 5 1313,
the fire dept. FIre 7 1313 and the time CAthedral 8 8000.
One of my aunts was an Illinois Bell operator and she used
to hate it when people called for the time because most of
the numbers were at the bottom of the dial.

[IbogaProject]

44. Yep

I use a password manager now.

[Cirsium]

45. Sure

Diamond 1 2827

[hedda_foil]

46. ARdmore 1-1307

[3catwoman3]

50. Does the one from age 12 count? By the time i was 12, my family...

...had moved 7 times, which is rather a lot, and I don't remember any of the ones before that. It initially began with CL4 - Clearwater 4. It was a 4 party line for a while.

And how about the password that I created only 2 hours ago? Damn, what was that?

[HUAJIAO]

51. Me. TE-7-3942. Try it. See if I answer.

[KitFox]

52. That's me!

My phone number was only 4 digits. I remember it, work numbers of my folks, and several friends, but I am hopeless when it comes to my passwords. We were on a party line and we knew one nosy neighbor was always listening in because she had 3 big dogs and we could hear them in the background.

[duncang]

53. Can't remember that phone number other than it started

With Mission. Yes I’m old enough to have used that for MIS then the rest of the phone number.

[DFW]

54. All the time. Think it through.

I had exactly one phone number in the house I grew up in, and for decades after I moved away. One phone number from 1955 to late 2002. Who wouldn’t remember that?

On the other hand, I have been asked to create unique passwords for EVERYTHING. Bank accounts, email accounts, Apps., air line ID, train ID, memberships, websites, and a hundred etc. There are so many, I needed a prompting notebook to remember them, and even that is in a random code incorporating unrelated languages like Finnish and even more obscure tongues. Hell no, I don’t remember all that stuff.

[Figarosmom]

55. Yep

[airplaneman]

56. I remember the one phone number until I moved out at age 16

I also remembered that it was an exciting event when the phone rang. I remember we could only talk for a few minutes on a long distance call. Actually I do remember about half of the more than 50 passwords that I have. I hate it when they make me change the password. I get tired of pulling out my password notebook for the passwords I don’t remember. Passwords are really a pain in the ass
-Airplane

[CousinIT]

58. Well, I use a password manager....

..but I also remember the phone number from my childhood.