The Last Word On Nothing

Have you ever dialed a phone number to get the weather forecast?

This is one of those questions and answers that dates you, like describing your favorite TV show in adolescence, or the brand of shoes that were extra cool in 10th grade. 

Dialing a number: There’s the first anachronism in that example. I don’t remember the last time I dialed a rotary phone, like literally turned a dial seven times to reach seven different numbers in sequence. But I am both old enough to have done this in my life, and old enough to have been sufficiently old at the time to form a memory of having done so. 

I am also old enough to remember how to call a number for the weather report. Or for what time I can go see a movie. Or for the exact time of day. These are things that became unnecessary long before I first used them, especially the time and weather ones. But I remember doing them anyway, because there was something charming about it, and because it felt somehow more active than watching the TV news.

Nowadays I look up the weather forecast on the National Weather Service website, holding my iPhone in my hand. This is technically active, in that I am entering a web address, but it feels very passive. I idly click on the bookmark and read. Something about calling a number is just more satisfying. It’s like calling a friend versus texting, or sending a Gchat.

More than a decade ago, I installed an iPod (remember those?) dock in my kitchen, and occasionally would use the local radio stations or the local weather channel. The weather forecast was a computer-synthesized voice broadcast through the radio, and my husband and I would mock the silly, Christopher Walken-like cadence. “Partly clo-OWdy,” the voice would read. I wondered if this voice still spoke somewhere, and whether anyone still listened. I looked up the weather service phone numbers and called the Denver/Boulder office. 

“Snow likely in the morning. Then a slight chance of snow early in the afternoon. Little or no snow accumulation. Highs near 40. Cloudy,” the voice read. It was a little better, a little more human-sounding.

I wondered how many other phone numbers still exist. The one for my city, Colorado Springs, no longer works. My former city, St. Louis, began with an ominous-sounding HELLO and progressed to sounding overly eager about the rain. “Mostly cloudy. High in the mid 60s to lower 70s. Tonight, mostly cloudy. Chance of showers in the evening. Chance of rain 80 percent!” 

I called for the time next. The National Institute of Standards and Technology still maintains a radio station that transmits the time of day to atomic clocks around the country, and operates a phone line you can call. When you call from a cell phone, there can be a delay of up to 150 milliseconds, so it’s not as perfect as the NIST standard clocks.

Any timepiece has to base its claims on something. Your cell phone gets the time from its communications tower. Your watch gets it from your cell phone, either directly or maybe from you. Your microwave gets it from you, which means when you set it, you checked another clock somewhere else. A radio station near Fort Collins, Colo., keeps all this straight. You probably didn’t even know it existed, but you can call it directly, and get the time. Call 303-499-7111. (Here is an article I wrote about station WWV many years ago.)

I called NIST a couple times, and heard a proud-voiced announcer call out “Coordinated Universal Time.” This was followed by a succession of what I can only characterize as boops. It was 9:27 p.m., according to my phone. The NIST website says some 1,000 people around the US call this number each day. 

I had the weather and the time, and I wondered about Moviefone next. A quick search revealed that 777-FILM apparently hung up for good in spring 2014, which is at least a decade longer than I thought it had lasted. I was a little disappointed.

This dive into telephonic nostalgia brought me at last to my favorite phone number. I wondered if it still worked. I programmed this number into my phone years and years ago, and I have forgotten about it and remembered it anew at least a dozen times. It’s even in my new area code. (It is not my number.) You can call it now, and you should:

719-266-2837

Just call it, and thank me later. While you listen, maybe reflect on the anachronistic habit of calling phone numbers for information — and how it can still be surprisingly fun. 

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Image credits: Top, Wikimedia Commons; middle, NIST WWV gallery