LIKE annoying pop songs, numbers from the past have a habit of sticking in your head. Good luck ever forgetting these.
118 118
Before the internet, directory enquiry providers were the alternative to scouring phone books. 118 118 did that and charged you for it, but by 2010 they were in serious decline thanks to easy internet access and smartphones. This was a good thing because the two runner guys in the advert were fairly annoying twats and nowadays the idea of ringing a phone number to get another phone number feels utterly insane.
0898 550055
Late-night TV viewers in the 90s had the number for Chatback drilled into their brains permanently, or perhaps Party Line (0898 21 21 21) or Yakety Yak (0898 22 66 22). Ring them and you could have a stilted conversation with random persons, and the only reason anyone did so was the incessant adverts. These usually had an annoyingly catchy jingle, a picture of a pretty blonde girl, or actors fake-chatting or dad-dancing. It didn’t matter that the ads were dogshit, their audience was lonely and captive. They may as well have just called themselves ‘Sad Bastard Number’.
3.142
Everyone remembers Pi, it’s a number at the heart of mathematics that has something to do with circles, the exact details of which were drummed into you at school but you instantly forgot as soon as the bell rang. These days you’re more likely to find some internet New Ager ascribing mystical significance to Pi, but f**k that. It’s just a Greek letter denoting a ratio. You don’t think ⅓ is mind-blowing cosmic magic, do you?
88
Film geeks will never forget that Marty McFly needed to reach 88 miles per hour to return to 1985 and trigger a strangely depressing sequel. It’s also the calibre of a famous German WWII anti-aircraft gun put to effective use against tanks. Knowing either of those facts is largely pointless.
01 811 8055
The number, of course, for Swap Shop, and you have to retroactively pity all the poor parents badgered to ring up with millions of other people trying to do the same. If you did get through you could swap some shit, win something, or speak to Suzi Quatro. It’s a number now tinged with sadness, because Cheggers is dead and you never did win a Millennium Falcon.
58008
Arguably the best number because when turned upside down on a calculator it spells ‘BOOBS’. Or you could input the longer and more formal 5318008. Calculator words got even sadder, with ones like 71077345 (‘shell oil’) proving fascinating to people of the 80s. What could be more romantic than impressing a girl called Debbie by typing 31883007734 on your Casio FX-7000G? Quite a lot actually, especially if she was called Rachel but you were constrained by the limited upside-down calculator vocabulary.
