For those of you who don't know....in Vancouver, you now have to dial ten digits to make a local call -- area code followed by the regular seven digit number. Some people aren't too happy about this. Apparently ten digits is much harder to remember than seven. And apparently ten digits is much more difficult to dial than seven. Well, fair enough. This is true, certainly, that ten digits is more work than seven. Complain as you will. However, there is a certain number of people who really don't have the right to complain. Those who require more than one number. I know of numerous households who have twice as many numbers (including house lines, cell phones, pagers, fax machines, etc) as they have people. If you are one of those people.....you are the one causing the problem! Rather than complaining, you should get rid of all of your phone numbers except one. Because complain as you will. But the fact remains. There are not enough phone numbers. You see, seven digit phone numbers have an upper limit on how many of them can exist. I don't know what the limit is, but you can be quite sure that there is one. Seven digits, that's ten million numbers. Get rid of all that start with 1 or 0. That's eight million. There's a number of other government imposed restrictions. Obviously you can't have a number that starts with 911. Stuff like that. So anyways......there is an upper bound. And we are getting close to that upper bound. Please, tell me what the solutions are other than making a longer phone number.

As I understand it, there are no other solutions. And really, how could there be? It's impossible. So the options are, separate the area into two area codes. I think the idea was to make downtown Vancouver one area code and everything else another one. What else? Oh, you could do eight digit dialing, that was an option. Of course you'd have to increase it again in three or four years, so that's not much good. Also....what? There were a couple others. I forgot. The one now, is that anybody getting a new phone line after some date in November, will have a new area code. The thing is, I just don't see any other options. Because there are none! I mean, you can say all you want about how seven digits is the optimal number to remember. But it's not enough. What are you going to do? Stop giving out phone numbers? Ban cell phones? Not likely.

We're all just going to have to suck it up, and remember those extra three digits......until we run out of area codes that is..............