prosthetic knowledge
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Beeper Code: The Caveman Days of Text Messaging Some of our codes were super private so I can’t share them, but others were standard: 411 for information, 911 for emergency, 143 to symbolized the number of letters in each word of the phrase “I love you.”
There was also an accepted system of sending numbers so that, when written together, looked vaguely like letters. We’d grown up getting adults to spell “BOOBLESS” on calculators by typing in the elements of a story about Dolly Parton and then holding the calculator upside down. (Her bra size was 69 and that was 2, 2, 2 big. So, she took 51 diet pills and went to see Dr. X eight times. Now she’s… 55378008.) From there, it was an easy jump to many other words. Hello was 07734. That was one of the easiest one. We said “Hello” a lot. Bitch? Why that was 81764, naturally. There were so many, it became necessary to have beeper-code dictionaries, or at least, a basic decoder.
