Area Code Overlays

It was bad enough when Robert Scheer went on his campaign to tell the phone companies how to run their business (Santa Monica Our Times), but on May 3 Shawn Hubler used her column to continue to encourage the public to rant and rave to our representatives in Sacramento and to the utilities until they back off the 310 area code overlay and the new 424 code.

Could someone tell me what’s so terrible about the need to dial an extra four digits, even if it is to call your next-door neighbor? Can someone tell me how they can complain because our society has become so affluent that literally everyone you know has a modem, fax, cell phone, private lines for their teenagers, etc?

Why not take a collective deep breath and spend our energy communicating with each other about what we might each do to change the world so that horrific events like Kosovo, Littleton and whatever’s waiting in the wings cease to be as much a part of our everyday lives as using the telephone?

JOYCE FIENBERG

Los Angeles

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An important fact barely mentioned in Hubler’s column--there is no technical reason to require all phone numbers in an overlay area to dial their own area code. This is a political decision by the California Public Utilities Commission. The telephone switching equipment will work better without this unnecessary additional burden, especially older mechanical switches with limited number registers. The Federal Communications Commission isn’t doing this to us. Our own politicians are.

B. CHANDLER SHAW

Granada Hills

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The only long-term solution to the area code problem is to make every home telephone number nine digits instead of seven. Why not set a date where every phone number in the country is lengthened by adding two zeros to the end of the number?

This way we keep a simpler area code map and avoid these terrible overlays. As more numbers are required, they can end in 01, 02, etc., right up to 99. It makes two fewer digits for everyone living with an area code overlay.

TIMOTHY BOND

Hollywood