The 209 has gotten too big for just three numbers.

Sometime in the coming months, if it hasn’t happened already, an overlay area code — 350 — is being assigned to new lines issued by wireless carriers and landline phone companies.

The California Public Utilities Commission in September announced it was teeing up the overlay area code for the 209 given the demand has just about exhausted all possible number combinations.

There’s no doubt overlays are a less obtrusive way to deal with the need to add new numbers than shifting area code boundaries.

That said rest assured as the years unfold there will be people who will specifically request the 209 area code when they get a new line on the hope an older number had been abandoned and is available after being “quarantined’ for 90 to 120 days depending upon the carrier.

It was a big sticking point for many Contel customers in Manteca when the company provided landline service back in the 1970s when the 239 prefix was added to the Manteca calling area. Longtime residents adding new lines wanted 823, which was the original prefix.

Apparently, it served as a numeric validation of their roots in Manteca or sort of a calling card to how long they’ve resided here.

Perhaps it won’t really matter with an overlay area code.

Landlines provided us with a different mentality.

It was also a different time.

Everyone knew phone numbers by heart.

Now, unless we have our own phone, we often can’t make a call by retrieving the number from our memory.

The low level of attention we now give to memorizing phone numbers is demonstrated when don’t have our hand-held computer — in the form of a smartphone that makes the Univac seem as cutting edge as an abacus — and we need to make a call.

Yet most of us who were around before the first brick — the 2 pound great-great-grandfather of the mobile phone that cost $3,995 — hit the market can still ember our childhood home phone number.

I cut the Verizon landline umbilical cord 19 years ago.
It’s been even longer since I dropped silver — or what passes for it these days from the U.S. Mint — to feed a pay phone.

Verizon dropped the last of their landline operations 7 years ago.
Verizon’s sale of its landline assets in Manteca and Ripon as well as elsewhere in California, Texas and Florida to Frontier Communications didn’t pique my attention. That ship had sailed a dozen years prior.

My relationship with Verizon, however, only got more expensive given they take a healthy chunk from my bank account every month.

Frontier Communication is the fifth phone carrier for both Manteca and Ripon.

First there were the respective Manteca Telephone Company and the Ripon Telephone Company. They got swallowed up by Contel that then was bought by GTE that eventually became part of Verizon.  
The deal involved  3.7 million voice lines and 2.2 million broadband lines in the three states. It would have been a lot less lines if the deal was done today.

The Centers for Disease Control reported in 2012  that 51.7 percent of American households no longer had landlines. By 2022, Pew Research indicated only 29.8 percent of Californian homes had landlines.

It’s not even a sure bet any longer that businesses will stick with landline voice lines given the possibility now exists for wireless protocols to replace company switchboards. To think otherwise, is the same as believing even three years ago that you needed a landline to have a burglar alarm.
To think we could survive without landlines was unthinkable 40 years ago.
That was when you could still call a real operator that actually worked in your community and not on some switchboard in Bangladesh.

It was when it was cutting edge to call POPCORN (767-2676) to hear the recorded female voice go, “At the beep, it will be 3:05 p.m., exactly”.

You also could call a phone company number for the local weather. Both numbers were disconnected long ago.
Now you use a handheld computer that has replaced your landline, watch, flashlight, alarm clock, thermometer, and just about anything an app can do.
It’s hard to believe that in 1966 — just 57 years ago — we had family friends that farmed outside of Lincoln that were still on a four party line and still had a phone in their kitchen that was a crank phone. It was finally history a year later.
By then the manual exchanges were gone and so were two letters at the start of a phone number. If you had told somebody back then you would one day be able to call people with a New York area code that were within a block of where you were in California they would have thought you needed to be committed.
It was still possible — although rare — by the mid-1960s to make a call where a human operator had to literally switch or hook you to the number you were calling on a switchboard.

 It was considered a marvel of modern engineering when Roseville Telephone could house all of the switching equipment for 40,000 customers in a two-story building. Now it doesn’t require a fraction of the space.
It was back in a time when kids were told to treat the phone book with respect. All hell would break loose if you tore the pages. It contained the name and number of anyone you might want to call without worrying about paying for directory assistance.
Today phone books — that look downright anorexic — often don’t even contain residential listings. The phone books are so disrespected now that many of us pick them up from our driveways where they are placed by distributing crews and toss them directly into our recycling carts.
It was when using a phone was a big deal. As a kid you had to earn the privilege and not abuse it. If the phone bill was more than $10 a month because you called a  friend in a town 20 miles away that was outside of the free exchange and talked for more than 20 minutes, your parents would hit the roof.
And if your sister asked for a princess phone that cost $2 more a month, she’d probably get a stern lecture that money doesn’t grow on trees.
Today most parents don’t flinch when they spend $300 on a smartphone and then at least $40 a month for a kid’s monthly service. It kind of makes you pine for the old days when the phone company leased you your phone and a $29 residential phone bill was considered astronomical.
One wonders what Alexander Bell was thinking back on March 10, 1876 when he made that first phone call to his assistant Thomas Watson and uttered the words “Mr. Watson — come here – I want to see you.”
I bet it wasn’t the fact we would literally one day see people face-to-face over the phone.
Welcome to the new Frontier(s) of communication.

 This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com