Back in January of 2006, Western Union’s telegram service ceased, which used to play such an important role in American life. All too soon, fewer of us will be able to play the “remember when” game when the topic is dialing the time. Still, I remember as a kid dialing the time to set clocks or to mark important times such as approaching midnight on New Year’s Eve.
I guess these are dying novelties as cell phone power user tricks are becoming far more useful. Things like numbers to dial after which you’d hang up and your phone would ring … and a number to call that would tell you what number you were calling from. I used to know other power user land line phone tricks, but I forgot them long ago. POPCORN was only used to help people remember the prefix. Still, utility watchdog groups say AT&T is ignoring its customer needs by unplugging time, citing that the service is used extensively by the disabled (especially the vision impaired) and by those without computers.īy the way, that old “dial POPCORN” trick is a misnomer … if you dialed the prefix 767 and any combination of four numbers thereafter, you would reach the time. Born in Atlanta, Daniels had to drop her southern accent for the taping so as to homogenize her voice.Īs you can imagine, the number of calls to phone-time are significantly lower than they used to be, and dropping at a rapid rate.
The San Francisco Chronicle article at the time of the demise of phone-time even featured a podcast interview with stage, TV and voice actress Joanne Daniels, the woman who originally recorded the looping audio track. However, one doesn’t have to look far to find the accurate time with cell phones, cable TV boxes, computers and cable news programs all featuring the time that is synchronized to some accurate (and probably Internet-based) source. when I’m working in one of the few states that do not observe daylight savings time. My favorite is something called The World Clock (that I use a lot when trying to figure out what the time is in some other world location.
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