Getting emotional over a phone number

I have had the same cell phone number (as has my wife) since 2000. Number portability is a huge advantage that saves you the hassle of updating your entire network every time you switch wireless carriers.

Still, I can't say I have much of an emotional attachment to my cell number.

The same, however, cannot be said of our home phone number.

Yes, we still have a home phone number because we still have a land line. That is going to change soon, however, as we'll finally be dropping traditional cable and phone service. I realize we're a few years behind the times there, but this is probably a better-late-than-never type of situation.

We hardly ever receive any important calls on the home phone anymore, so it's kind of pointless to have it.

The only thing I'll regret is losing the number. Terry and I got married in 1992 and have had it as our home number ever since. But I actually owned the number for six years prior to that.

As I've mentioned before, I got online via my Commodore 64 in 1985. This involved tying up our home phone line every time I would call a local bulletin board system (BBS) and use my stolen 300 baud modem so that my computer could "talk" to a computer on the other end of the line.

That meant no one could call our house as long as I was online. You quickly learned how to disable your call waiting so that, if someone did call while you were surfing the pre-Internet digital world, you wouldn't have your connection broken.

After several months of this, I talked to my dad and he agreed we could get a separate phone line just for me that I could use for computer purposes. I paid the bill for the line myself, to the tune of $18 per month. It was money well spent, and for a time I even ran my own BBS on it.

Once Terry and I married and moved into our own house, the easiest thing to do was just to bring that existing line with me, so that it became "our" number instead of "my" number.

And now, once we cut the cord, it will be going away after 35 years in my/our possession. It's a silly thing to be sad over, but I associate a lot of great conversations and important memories with that phone number.

It also comes at a time when we're adjusting to having sold my mom's house recently, and for the first time in my life not being able to drive over there and just walk in.

These things happen to everybody, and they happen every day.

Time goes on, whether we like it or not.

But I guarantee that, no matter how old and senile I become, those seven digits will be absolutely seared into my brain forever.