We’re currently having some very expensive work done on our kitchen and basement. Got an e-mail this afternoon from a contractor telling me that while working on our basement, they noticed that our gas furnace needs immediate replacement.
Fortunately, I noticed a 206 (Seattle) area code.
I was sorely tempted to respond “Sure, go ahead, and only top-of-the-line will do.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
I hate to say this, but area codes don’t mean a thing anymore. Ours is 262, which is Kenosha, WI . . . altho we moved to Florida three years ago (727). Remember what you stated earlier . . . we don’t change our phone numbers – including our area codes – when we move.
As Randall notes: https://xkcd.com/1129/
That’s how I recognize spam calls; if the area code is 262, but a name from my phone contacts doesn’t come up, I don’t answer.
Yes, Andréa… but a Seattle area code COMBINED WITH the fact that IBB hasn’t mastered the concept of e-mail added up to a reasonable certainty.
I guess we’ll find out soon . . . isn’t it a bit too much of a coincidence, tho, that HE is having basement work done at the same time as you are?
Ah, there is that.
“That’s how I recognize spam calls; if the area code is 262, but a name from my phone contacts doesn’t come up, I don’t answer.”
Same here. For my area code, of course.
I find that area codes do have a strong, although not absolute, relationship with location for businesses, which often have land lines.
There’s a trick some contractors use when them arrive at towns which have been hit by natural (or unnatural) disasters. The first thing they do is get a cell phone from a local store so they can have a local area code.
Today a kinsman mentioned to me that when he moved from NJ to NYC, rather than keeping his cell number, he made a point of getting a 212 (NYC) area code.
In UK-land, landline area codes are firmly connected to geographic areas but mobile phone number “prefix” numbers are not. Instead they are allocated to various phone service providers, so you have no idea where a caller is based. All UK 07 numbers are for mobiles, pagers and personal numbering. Mine is 07817, which is allocated to EE (well, originally Orange when I got it, but that’s now part of EE and Orange is slowly being wound down). But again it is not a reliable indicator of what provider a person is with, as you can take your number with you when you change from EE to, for instance, O2 or Vodaphone.
https://www.area-codes.org.uk/mobile/07817-numbers.php
Germany handles things just as nartmitaj described for the UK. You can take your mobile number with you (even when you move to a different carrier), but not the landline number (if you move to a different district). The really weird thing is that Germany has started letting people keep their license plate number even when they move to a different city, and a whole list of retired city codes have been resurrected.
Interesting Kilby. I didn’t know that German license plates indicated a city. In the US, as long as you don’t move to a different state, it doesn’t matter where in the state you live. But when you move to a different state, you have to get a new Driver’s license and a new vehicle license plate. (Going away to college doesn’t usually count as moving to another state.) I just assumed that other countries did similar things with whatever sort of districting they use to subdivide the country.
A few states have license plates that indicate where you live (or where the plate was issued), either by text, code, or even a coded part of the license plate number.
Nebraska is one that has the last format, with the county of issue indicated by the first 1 or 2 digits (followed by a dash) of the plate number. My grandfather used to point out the county of origin when he saw Nebraska license plates, getting particularly excited when he encountered one that began with 52, the designation Kearny County where he grew up.
I love this group. A simple comment about an email turns into a world tour of phone numbering systems. hehe
Florida, when I lived there, used to encode the county of registration by a prefix to the number, followed by letters (or a null) for the vehicle class. I think the counties were numbered in population order, as Dade (not yet “Miami-Dade”) was always number 1. And 1- was a compact passenger car, 1W- a standard sedan, and 1WW- a big “luxury” passenger car. We liked to say those letters stood for “Weighty” and “Wery Weighty”.
(Later Florida plates I’ve seen just have the county name in a little oblong of the plate.)
Say, where is Ted From Ft. Lauderdale these days? I remember we compared phone exchanges, and might have both had Highland 4 or Mohawk 6 numbers.
With Chak’s permission [;-)]… Germany has uniform (rather dull) license plates nationwide: black numbers on a white background, always in the form of “CCC-AA1234” (each part is variable length). There is no such thing as a “vanity” plate such as permitted in most US states, but it is usually possible to select the letters and numbers after the hyphen (normally for a small extra fee). The one- to three-letters before the hyphen are the official designation for the town or district in which the car is (or was initially) registered, and cannot be changed.
The “AA” are one or two-letters that have to be selected from a list of permissible combinations for that town (probably to avoid conflicts with other town designators). The “1234” is a one- to four-digit number, and is freely selectable, as long as there is no conflict with plates already in service. Some combinations are very popular: a friend in Berlin (in which all plates start with “B-“) told me that it was impossible to choose the letters “MW”, because all of the allowable numbers had already been used up (by “BMW” owners).
P.S. @ Mitch4 – Florida’s classification system used to have a separate designation for rental vehicles. After a spectacular series of robbery & murders, they realized that this information was being used by thieves to target tourists, who tended to carry more than average amounts of cash. They then changed the system so that it is (supposedly) no longer possible to identify a rental just from the plates.
When I was first driving, Missouri had the first letter indicate the month they were issued. I’m not sure how they decided which letter, as obviously there are more letters than months, and it was spread out so that December was ‘Z’. Originally you got new plates every year, so the letter helped police determine who had expired plates.
Later they switched to a sticker system with the old plates, so I had the last number for several years. I still recall that because that time frame you had write your plate number when buying gas with a credit card. I memorized ZMB-157 so I wouldn’t have to go back and look.
Kilby, does the number stay with the car, even when it changes hands?
“I love this group. A simple comment about an email turns into a world tour of phone numbering systems. hehe” -Chak
I totally agree.
I grew up in Tennessee, and they used to do the same as Florida, giving the counties numbers and putting them at the beginning of the license plate numbers. The most populous county was 1, and my county, Coffee County, was 42. We went on frequent day and weekend trips around the state, and it was fun learning the numbers for the counties. I live in Texas now, and they are not that organized here!
German license plates don’t indicate the city, but rather the Landkreis, which is roughly equivalent to an American county. A lot of big cities are their own counties, so for places like Berlin it’s the same thing. The reintroduction of outdated location codes is largely because the consolidation of counties in the 70s and 80s generated a fair amount of resentment on the part of the counties that were absorbed and lost their identity. Why they’re now letting people keep their old location code when they move to a new district, I have no idea.
The location codes are interesting. The larger the locale, the fewer letters it has, and size at the time the codes were established determined priority. So a single letter means a big city, two letters means a large city or populous area or maybe a big city that’s just a little smaller than another place with the same initial. Three letters means anything else. The exception to all this is cities and towns that were once part of the Hanseatic League. They get to append a H at the front, so for example Hamburg is HH even though it’s bigger than Hannover, which gets H. This was all laid down when Germany was still divided and letter combos were reserved for places in the east and promptly put in place after reunification.
@Chak: No, the number either goes back into the pool after six months (I think) or you can have it transferred to your new car, if you like.
As I recall, Iowa had the county on the plates. Looks like they still do.
https://www.iowadot.gov/mvd/personalizedplates/home.aspx
Not sure of any other states.
Hawai’i sort of designates the county on their plates (3 letters space 3 numbers.) The big island’s all started with H, but ran short so they started using Z. Mauai, Moloka’i and lanai start with M (I think the three islands are considered one county), Kaua’i starts with K, and O’ahu and the city-county of Honolulu get all the rest, but I’m not sure how they are divided up. Another piece of trivia, the county is the lowest level of government on Hawai’i. The county has a mayor and county council. Towns are really just census designated places with no governing body, although some of the resort areas have also incorporated as HOAs, so there’s that.
Thanks to DemetriosX for the concise description of Germany’s political subdivisions. Comparing relative scales is complicated. The entire country is not quite as big as Montana, but contains a population more than twice as large as California. There are 16 German “states”; the smaller ones aren’t even as big as a western U.S. “county”, but there are some “Landkreise” that are much larger than typical counties in the eastern U.S.
The overall system is a bit like the the “townships” in Pennsylvania: when I was a kid, I thought was just “towns”, but if you look at them on a map, they turn out to be a gridlike subdivision of the counties.
P.S. The “Landkreis” divisions of German states have nothing to do with grids, of course. German political boundaries are all ancient history and natural obstacles (rivers and mountains). I cannot find a single case of a German “straight line” border that was drawn on a map (in massive contrast to all the rectanglular states and counties in the U.S.)
P.P.S. When DemetriosX mentioned “Landkreis” reform as happening in the 70’s and 80’s, he was speaking from a western German perspective. The same thing has been going on in eastern Germany for the last 10 or 15 years. There was an attempt to merge the city of Berlin with the state of Brandenburg, this was rejected in a rare voter referendum. Since then, Brandenburg has been trying to consolidate villages and towns into larger “communities”, and reduce the number of “Landkreise” through mergers. The idea is to save money by reducing the bureaucracy, but renaming places and forcing people to change their addresses hasn’t been that popular.
I’m surprised PA has townships. I thought that was something that grew out of the subdivision of the Northwest Territory and further expansions to the west when a grid system was imposed on everything.
It’s not surprising there are no real straight lines in German political geography. That’s something that usually takes virgin territory to set down rather than growing organically. Heck, among German cities Mannheim is considered unique because it has an orthogonal grid of streets.
I’ve never been in Mannheim(*), but I looked it up and was surprised to discover that the “grid” dates from the 17th century (I had suspected it might have been “rebuilt” that way after WWII).
P.S. Passing through the city on my first arrival in Germany (decades ago) doesn’t count. The only thing I “saw” in Mannheim back then was the main bus station.
P.P.S. Karlsruhe has an unusual system of radial streets and concentric cross streets, based on the historic palace at the center (but this comprises only a fraction of the city’s area). The radials are slightly reminiscent of Washington’s “avenues”.
I suspect the definition of “township” is somewhat nebulous: my town in western NJ is a township.
DemetriosX: re: Hanseatic cities — really? I’m on vacation and don’t really have time to check, but I’m pretty sure that Lübeck is Lü, and I don’t think Bremen is HB… is it? (HL though, I’m almost positive it ain’t..)
@ larK – A number of German cities really do honor their historic “Hanseatic League” status on their license plates. Besides Bremen (HB), there’s Greifswald (HGW), Hamburg (HH), Lübeck (HL), Rostock (HRO), Stralsund (HST), and Wismar (HWI).
P.S. The identifier “LÜ” doesn’t exist, just “LU” for “Ludwigshafen”.
DemetriosX – we have townships in NYS also – they traveled here from England I believe. The general rule here is counties are divided into townships and maybe also , cities. Then the townships are divided into incorporated villages and unincorporated areas which may be called villages or hamlets.
I have noticed that a number of states have counties listed on their license plate.
My dad used to bring me a different Dana Girls book every month when he went to Oil City, PA for work. I could not get them in NY. The Dana Girls would make reference to a car’s license plate as being from near their home – or not being from same – and I always wondered how they knew. I now figure they were from states with some designation of county or such on the plate.
Follow-up: I just got the estimate from IBB’s painter. Again, I thought at first it was ours, even though we got OUR painter’s estimate last week.
We’re having all our work done because of a catastrophic water leak. How weird would it be if he had the same thing?
@larK: Yep, what Kilby said. I think there’s some level a town had to be at in the League to be eligible. For instance, Einbeck (where bock beer was invented) was a Hanseatic town as sort of a central shipping point to move wood up to the coast, but didn’t have an H back when they were their own Kreis or now that their old code has been revived.
@Bill: You’re moving into some Twilight Zone level stuff there.
If this was a movie, we’d be moving into the exciting twist reveal, where Bill finds out that somehow he actually is IBB.
If IBB’s painter’s quote was better, maybe you should go with him…
No, actually my guy’s estimate is better.
I’d give IBB his name, but I imagine travel costs would affect he price.
@ larK & DemetriosX – One thing I discovered when I looked up the license plates is that the League never had a fixed membership, it was merely a loose association. The “H” prefix for Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck goes back to the earliest German plate regulations in 1906; it’s unclear how the later (smaller, more obscure) cities were able to get their status approved.
DemetriosX_- missing from reply about townships – due to laptop deciding to freeze up last night, is that while in the midst of what I said about counties, townships, etc. NYC is a city that is not in a county – it comprises 5 counties on it’s own, which are contained within the city.
I don’t know about elsewhere, but in New Jersey we have towns that are actually part of other towns. I’ve never met anybody who actually understands that, even those who live there.
@ CIDU Bill – That happens here quite frequently. Many German towns are grouped together for adminstrative reasons. People living in the subsidiary portion use the name of the primary town in their postal address, but add “OT [name]” on a separate line. (The “OT” stands for “Ortsteil“, meaning “location portion”.) This is especially important when street names are replicated in each of the respective sections, which can easily occur.
When German towns share the same name, they often add a locational identifier to prevent confusion. This is usually the name of the local river (“Frankfurt am Main“, as opposed to “Frankfurt/Oder“), or sometimes a larger town nearby (“Spandau bei Berlin“). It is only rarely the name of the surrounding “state” (as in “Landau in der Pfalz“). Other than those rare exceptions, the name of the German state is never included in a postal address. American companies just don’t unserstand this, and put it in anyway, much to the consternation of the post office.
Thanks Kilby and DemetriosX for doing my research for me ;-)
Like I said, I’m on vacation, and I think I need a vacation from my vacation…
I think I actually knew most of what you’ve told me, but it wasn’t accessible in my current state — the Lübeck designation is particularly galling to me, as I know I should know it, as I know I knew it; also, the Bremen one I now recall remembering when I saw it when I was last in Germany in April — I specifically recall it throwing me until I figured it out, and then remembering that Hansa cities do that.
I don’t think I’m being very coherent… I think I need a vacation…
Bill are they towns that are part of towns or villages which are part of towns – which is what we have? I can get confusing.We live in the Town of Hempstead, but not the village of Hempstead and we live in in an unincorporated area (meaning not a incorporated town or city) of the Town also called an unincorporated village or a hamlet. ‘
If I call the Hempstead Town sanitation department for a special garbage pickup,they will ask me what “town” I live in. I tell them, correctly, Hempstead, they will then refer me to the sanitation department for the village of Hempstead as the employees do not even understand that they should be asking for which village I am in and that there is a difference between the Town,who employs them, and a village. I have taken to telling them Town of Hempstead, unincorporated area of East Meadow so that I am answering correctly and they might understand.
Meryl, for all I know there are towns within towns, within other towns, and those towns are incorporated within riddles, which themselves are wrapped in mysteries and those mysteries are inside enigmas.
My mother (also in New Jersey) lives in a town that apparently doesn’t exist, and I get my mail delivered to a post office in a town that used to exist as part of my township — but now everything around the post office has been returned to the township and the town consists only of the land around the post office — making the postmaster, technically, its mayor,
(except… aren’t post office technically U.S. Government property?)
Our community does not exist either. Our mail and zipcode are for an adjacent community. Our schools and library belong to another community. Our fire department is from still another community.
We have 2 post offices that are close enough to walk to (okay,one of them is just over 2 miles away, but we did walk there and back a few times after Sandy hit to get our box mail) but neither is the one for our house. That is about a 10 minute drive south. We live on the north end of the PO district and the PO is on the south end.
New York license plates at least used to have codes indicating county. I know this because my grandfather lived in New York City but did a lot of driving upstate where he owned a resort. When he was upstate… how can I put this nicely… he tended to drive like a @#$% maniac. He used the upstate address to register his car, reasoning that the police would be less likely to ticket “a local.”