214-748-3647: The World’s Most Common Phone Number?
No idea how accurate this account is, but it’s too cool not to relate: According to a Computerworld article, 214-748-3647 is the most commonly recorded phone number. How is this possible, considering that most phone numbers are supposed to, well, correspond to just one phone? Per the article:
Why? Because some programmer somewhere didn’t learn his lesson from Y2K, and decided to store phone numbers as a single integer instead of a string of characters, but only used 32 bits and didn’t check for overflow. So any time someone enters a phone number that’s larger than 2147483647, the system stores it as that Dallas number.
Somewhere in Dallas, some poor bastard is wondering why his phone rings off the hook with calls for the Nevada Division of Mental Health & Developmental Services, the Jackson County Florida Chamber of Commerce, a yacht club in New York…..
‘Course, there are a lot of area codes that correspond to bigger numbers than 214, so that would be quite a few overflows if this story is legit.
(Computerworld via J-Walk Blog)
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