I used to work for a paging company about 600 years ago. InterLink Paging. This was back in the dark ages, when mobile phones were still the size of shoe boxes and it actually made sense to own (or lease) a “beeper”.
Anyway. We used to have a policy that a phone number had to be out of service for at least 6 months before we were allowed to give that number to a new customer. It made sense to me. Sure, every now and then if we were “low” on numbers — usually an order hadn’t been fulfilled by Southern Bell in time — we might assign someone a number that had only been out of commission for five months or something wacky like that.
I think this is not a policy that has been adopted by the cell phone companies in Los Angeles.
I constantly receive phone calls for previous owners of my numbers. I’ve been through three distinct phones on three plans (Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon) in the last two+ years and all three numbers carried with them the angry ex-girlfriends, bill collectors, old business acquaintances, and, in one really pathetic case, mother of cell-phone-numbers owners-past. (Dude. How do you not give your mom your new phone number?)
Today I was particularly irked. The previous person that had my current cell phone number was named David. Someone called and said, “Hey, Dave.”
I answered, “Yes?”
“You still want these 49ers tickets or what?”
Dang!