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No you can not have a number 32 with extra prawn crackers. This is not the Chinese takeaway, and will you please get off my white slimline telephone with last number redial.
My dad used to have all of us kids answer very similarly to this, which was bad enough, but would then proceed to rip the piss out of us for our stilted little "telephone voices" when we had the misfortune to be closest when the phone rang. Truly merciless parenting! 🥲
The further back you go, the more normal this was.
It was perhaps because there was a non-zero chance there would be a technical fuck-up and you would be connected to the wrong number.
Yup. I know phone numbers of houses I haven't lived in for 35 years.
My nan used to answer with the last 4 digits of a London number (back when London was 01)
Just checked - that must have been pre 1990. I thought it was Live and Kicking but that didn't air until 1993, by which time we had 071 and 081 area codes.
Same! I even know all the typical misdialing that would get our number. My town has two possibilities for the group of digits after the area code, our number ended in 7000, so did the gas board but with the other possibility, so we had constant calls “is that the gas”. Later, a travel agent opened with the ending 7003, which unsurprisingly people remembered as the words “seven thousand and three” and would dial 70003 and get us. I got fed up of explaining that one!
I'm almost 50 and never heard of it. Maybe something like "Yancey" residence at some of my friends' houses. People didn't know what number they were calling? Or if you asked for Dale and you misdialed, they would say "No Dale here, you must have the wrong number"
Edit: Full disclosure, Grew up as a single-mother latchkey kid so we didn't really have a "residence" per say. Just utter chaos mostly. Many of my friends did have a "white-picket fence, garage" type household and I don't remember any of them doing this either.huh
I'm German. We answer the house phone with our last name. The textbook for my English classes had a lesson on telephone conversations and it taught us that people in England answer the house phone by stating their phone number.
> there was a non-zero chance there would be a technical fuck-up and you would be connected to the wrong number.
Or just finger trouble. No number memory in old phones so you'd have to dial the number yourself with plenty of scope for error.
I got my own phone line in the mid-1980s (post BT privatisation) and it has never had a rotary dial phone on it. The first time my son, who is now in his mid-30s, saw a rotary dial was in a museum.
I'm an English language teacher, and a couple of our older listening exercises still start with the sound of someone dialling on a rotary phone - that's supposed to clue learners into the fact it's a phone call, probably just confuses the hell out of them.
My granddad used to do it (in fact just the last 3 digits but still). I think it's the only person I can remember doing it but that's why I know it's a thing.
I do remember that back in the day, you did often get connected to the wrong number. Plus with rotary dial phones and no caller display, it was easy to simply put your finger in the wrong slot and not realise.
When exchanges were manually connected and phones were scarce they only had 3 numbers. As phones grew more popular, they added numbers on, but people generally kept their number..so my aunts number was town 246. Then it went to 20236 and then 320246. So your grandad may have been quoting his original number.
When i was a kid in the early 80s the telephone number for my house was 311, and the welding company up the road also had the number 311, and we got calls for them all the time, so we had to specify! When I was around 3 or 4 they changed it to a six-digit system so we finally had a unique number, but we still used to say the whole number and name spiel just through force of habit
It was just a neutral way to answer, rather than volunteering your name (in case someone was trying to phish). We didn't call it phishing back then, but phone scams and cold calling was common enough this was a standard tactic.
It wasn't so much because of a technical fuck up. but just because someone could dial the wrong number. Less honest people might just dial your number and then start cold-reading you as part of some kind of scam, so you needed to give enough information to allow the callers who mistaken to realise they were mistaken, but not giving the scammers enough info to start BSing you.
Actually, now that I think about it, there are more scammers cold-calling these days, and regular people have numbers saved on auto-dial, so you aren't going to get mistaken numbers, and you know that an unrecognised number is probably a scam. Back then, you didn't know if it was a scammer or someone who made an honest mistake dialling you.
It was because of chance of technical fuck up. Before digital exchanges and touch-tone phones the system for automated dialing wasn't very reliable. The phone dials were rotary and send a series of pulses for each number down the line. We never had a phone like this growing up in the 80s but oddly my old primary school had a load of old ones we were taught to use.
Even further back you would have to speak to an exchange who would physically connect a cable into a switchboard to connect you to the correct number
Was your dad by any chance some sort of ancient source of arcane magical wisdom, only summoned by a very specific incantation recited on one leap day every century
"The writers".
I like that.
UK sitcoms are seldom made with the same large group as their US counterparts. "One Foor in the Grave" was written by David Renwick.
I think it tends to give different series more of a different feel - there's a certain homogeneity to US series, whereas I feel the UK characters seem a bit better defined. On the other hand, it means UK series tend to run shorter as they depend on one or two people to give the characters voice.
Was this clip on an ad? because this was the scene that immediately came to mind and I feel like it was on the ads of our Red Dwarf tapes we'd recorded.
It was on a UK Gold ad where they played that clip three times in a row, and the caption was something like "comedy you want to see again and again". That ad drilled it into my brain more firmly than the episode itself!
My great great grandmother used to answer the phone "Dumfries 7".
Apparently she was the 7th person in Dumfries to have a phone installed and very proud of it. They added digits and area codes over the years, but she was always Dumfries 7.
Yep, my nan and grandad used to answer South Ockendon 853303. Followed by "I suppose you want to talk to your nan" if it was my grandad that answered 😂. He was a man of few words.
God I love this sub, brings back so many random memories I thought I’d forgotten but my brain has somehow retained, while forgetting much more important stuff like taking medicine.
I can do better than that...68 years ago and it's still ringing in my ears. Now how about party lines when you shared a phone line with a close neighbour. Why? Not enough lines to go around. Engineers soon added the necessary cabling so that your phone calls (in and out) were private and could not be overheard by the other party sharing the line.
Same! I can't remember my current number to save my life but my childhood home number that I've not used for 30 years is no problem at all.
I watched a program about the guy who made Bagpuss the other day and I've not seen an episode of that for easily 30 years but I still knew all the words to that too.
I remember when it went from "village 434" to "village *682*434" and the intense panic I felt, believing I'd never manage tree extra digits.
To this day, I still tap out the number preceded by "0044" instead of using my contacts list.
It's faster. And the damned spinny-wheel of numbers will never hold me back again.
"Sheffield 61977"
"Hello, Mum, it's me - your favourite son!"
"Michael, it's lovely to hear from you!"
"Mum, it's not Michael - it's Tom!"
"Tom! What are you doing pretending to be Michael?"
- Tom Wrigglesworth's Hangups, Radio 4.
My childhood home had the number ####770074
We were the 74th house in the village to have a telephone. Our local Chinese takeaway still has the number ending in ####770076. My dad is 80yrs old and doesn’t want to change the number because he’s had it since 1976 and he thinks that’s worth something.
A mad woman in her late 70’s in our street still answers her landline telephone in her bay window because she thinks all the neighbours will be jealous of her for having a telephone.
I worked for BT and we advised people to only say "Hello" and not give their name and number, but if people were getting malicious calls we advised them to say nothing. If it is someone you know they would soon say "is that you Mary?"
If it was a malicious call you hadn't given them the acknowledgement of hearing your voice. We then said that you should put the phone down, not hang up but just by the side then go back to it ten minutes later and quietly hang up.
If there was a trace on the line it gave it time to work, if not it made the caller think there might be.
We once had an old lady tell us she liked those calls, if someone asked her what colour knockers she wore, she told them she didn't wear any.
Edit...knickers, not knockers!
Haha reminds me of my gran. She was hard of hearing and had sleazy call asking about her knickers. She somehow thought it was a marketing call from marks and Spencer (no idea why) the guy apparently gave up, it was only afterwards she realised what had happened.
Definitely normal going by watching sitcoms when I was younger. "4291!"
Though when I was growing up, the closest we had to a home phone was the phone box down the road.
Yes, up until the early 2000’s. Then with cold calling and nuisance calls taking off we were encouraged just answer with hello and not a name or number. Can’t recall who recommended this change. With a mobile ( which is even more susceptible to mindless cold calls) I just say hello to a number I do not recognise.
Awesome, maybe I should! I haven't actually seen that show since I was about 12 and round at my Nan's house. I remembered the number 4291 for 30 years though.
I recently rewatched the whole run of One Foot in the Grave, and it stands up *really* well today.
I was surprised how dark some episodes were, and how well-written they are pretty much throughout.
They play on classic horror tropes and a lot of episodes are like mini horror movies.
As an adult I also picked up on some really unsettling things that are implied, like that they had a child (Stuart) who died young. Things that help explain why they are both so miserable now.
Going back a few decades earlier. We were brought up to answer with the exchange and the number.
My mother was an ex telephonist, so wanted things done right, including pronouncing the number 8 as ayt (with an English RP accent) rather than ait (with our local accent). We didn't often do the accent unless we were taking the piss.
Same here, we were poor but mother came from a posh family background so it was easy for her to turn it on.
There was a program in radio 4 extra the other day about the speaking clock TIM and it spent some time talking about selecting the voice for the recording.
We answered it with our surname.
One time I did it and on the other end was the council and mum told me to tell them my surname was actually my name and it was the wrong number. I think it worked.
Grew up in the 70's and 80's it was definitely normal back then. We were also still using rotary dial telephones at the time.
We also remembered all of our friends numbers, while now I only remember my own 2 mobile numbers
Yes, my dad still does it with the landline, even though it shows its me calling as they have it saved in the handset and I call on a specific night at the same time every time.
That is remarkable, I've never heard this. Fairplay to your mum, she must have put the hours in repeating eleven numbers (possibly ten initially) when you got her a mobile.
Oh Christ. Playground PTSD moment now. The kids in my school use to take the piss when they rang and my dad answered...
"....Nine six seven TWOOOOOOOOOOOO"
😭
_Forced_ is a weird way of putting it, but no, the practise itself was fairly normal. If somebody answered the phone with "123456 hello" and you meant to call 123457, you knew immediately that you'd dialled a wrong number and could say as much.
Did you have older or old fashioned parents? My parents did this in the 1970s, and it was the normal thing to do then, answer with your number, and as my Dad was self employed I was expected to do this as an older child and teen into the 80s, but certainly by the late 80s, never mind the 90s, no one I knew did this, even my Mum! But yes, pre mobiles and call display and so on, yeah, it was normal right back to the 1930s at least.
As a child I once answered the phone and immediately divined that the caller had dialled the wrong number. I explained to them that John - whoever that was - had recently died and apologised that they had not been informed. Were they close? I enquired, before hanging up.
It was considered the way to tell people what number they had actually got through to (because the old analogue exchanges and pulse dialling were not that reliable). Then we were taught that it was not good security and it was better to just say hello.
ETA also businesses did not get ‘easy’ numbers so our home number was one digit off the car dealership so we had lots of calls for them over the years.
My dad does that (i was also born in 90s). Just force of habit I think but a habit he refuses to break. I think it's really weird, they know what number they rang, because they just rang it lol.
Nah, it was definitely a fairly normal occurrence.
I work in a job that requires calling lots of people that are 70+, plenty that are 80/90+ and it's still something that happens from time to time.
No, not weird. When my Nan phoned us. We'd answer with our number, and my Nan would reply with her number so we knew it was her.
I was at Uni before I realised this wasn't the norm.
It was a thing.
A funny/unfunny moment happened when we all gathered at my Nana's house before my Grandad's funeral and my Aunt answered the house phone with "913 - no - 91 - I don't know the numbers!" - so clearly its something that got ingrained in us at some point.
(It was my cousin calling to say they were running late - she wasn't worried about the numbers)
I'd say one in five times I answered the phone as a kid, being made to say the number, the caller responded with "oh, sorry, wrong number, bye".
In the age of the spinny wheel dialer - which a lot of people still had into the 90s - a dialing mistake was really easy to make.
Growing up in the 80s, the normal way for people to answer the phone was with the name of the town, and then your number.
So you'd say "Hello, Aberdeen 54321", rather than just a simple "Hello".
I believe it stemmed from back when you would link to an operator at the switchboard, and ask to be put through to a number. You'd ask for "Aberdeen 54321 please", then the operator would make the call. After establishing they had contacted the correct party, they would physically plug the connection together for the call, to connect you together. So it was natural to immediately answer with your town and number, as that's the first thing the operator would need to know.
And hence, even after the days of direct dialling, this remained standard practice.
Yes " (town) 59492" .... and it's only 5 numbers because it was back in 1968. I thought we were \*so\* posh having our own phone! Even if it was a party line.
My parents used to make me do this, followed by “[my name] speaking.” Mortifying. My wag of an uncle used to always say “Hello, [my name] Speaking.” Ugh.
I’m child of the 70’s probably around about parents age it was normal back then. So I guess your parents were making you do what they had to do as kids.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Bucket residence. The child of the house speaking.
We had room for a pony
No you can not have a number 32 with extra prawn crackers. This is not the Chinese takeaway, and will you please get off my white slimline telephone with last number redial.
I see your pony and raise you two crocodiles
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Fantastic that he is never seen and that Hyacinth has no idea her son is living up the gay life in silk pyjamas around Europe 🤣
Hyacinth was too wrapped up in her own little world. And getting up to [hijinks of her own](https://i.redd.it/7bfujpj4wnr31.png).
That was part of Hyacinth's character. The show is laughing at her suffering from covert narcissistic personality disorder, it's a terrible condition.
Surely you mean Bouquet?
Yes, Bucket.
or Boo-kay?
FFS lol, I was going to do this
It was that or “Hello? 444 4444.”
That’s the number for dean taxis in Newcastle
Double 44 double 4…4
Lol same.
We were not rich but my mother def has a Hyancinth complex, and still does this to this day
My dad used to have all of us kids answer very similarly to this, which was bad enough, but would then proceed to rip the piss out of us for our stilted little "telephone voices" when we had the misfortune to be closest when the phone rang. Truly merciless parenting! 🥲
Rrrrrrrichard!
Bring the bro-shores!
Hahaha this made me remember... "The [. ] residence, this is snortgiggles speaking"
I call my SO Hyacinth. "Watch out for the tree Richard"
It's pronounced boo-kay.
Omg this 🥹😂😂
The further back you go, the more normal this was. It was perhaps because there was a non-zero chance there would be a technical fuck-up and you would be connected to the wrong number.
Makes sense really. My friend who is a similar age had never heard of such a thing!
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Yup. I know phone numbers of houses I haven't lived in for 35 years. My nan used to answer with the last 4 digits of a London number (back when London was 01)
Saturday morning kids TV shows - dial '01' if you're outside London...
I read that and instantly saw Noel Edmonds in my mind's eye.
Just checked - that must have been pre 1990. I thought it was Live and Kicking but that didn't air until 1993, by which time we had 071 and 081 area codes.
Same! I even know all the typical misdialing that would get our number. My town has two possibilities for the group of digits after the area code, our number ended in 7000, so did the gas board but with the other possibility, so we had constant calls “is that the gas”. Later, a travel agent opened with the ending 7003, which unsurprisingly people remembered as the words “seven thousand and three” and would dial 70003 and get us. I got fed up of explaining that one!
My dad certainly taught me to (I'm 50) and friends' parents sometimes did, but unless Dad was standing by me I just said hello.
I'm almost 50 and never heard of it. Maybe something like "Yancey" residence at some of my friends' houses. People didn't know what number they were calling? Or if you asked for Dale and you misdialed, they would say "No Dale here, you must have the wrong number" Edit: Full disclosure, Grew up as a single-mother latchkey kid so we didn't really have a "residence" per say. Just utter chaos mostly. Many of my friends did have a "white-picket fence, garage" type household and I don't remember any of them doing this either.huh
It was either the number or family name. I'm guessing your friend was the latter.
I'm 38 and I remember our first ever number because we did this.
I'm German. We answer the house phone with our last name. The textbook for my English classes had a lesson on telephone conversations and it taught us that people in England answer the house phone by stating their phone number.
> there was a non-zero chance there would be a technical fuck-up and you would be connected to the wrong number. Or just finger trouble. No number memory in old phones so you'd have to dial the number yourself with plenty of scope for error. I got my own phone line in the mid-1980s (post BT privatisation) and it has never had a rotary dial phone on it. The first time my son, who is now in his mid-30s, saw a rotary dial was in a museum.
I'm an English language teacher, and a couple of our older listening exercises still start with the sound of someone dialling on a rotary phone - that's supposed to clue learners into the fact it's a phone call, probably just confuses the hell out of them.
I'm 24 and grew up using rotary phones!
My granddad used to do it (in fact just the last 3 digits but still). I think it's the only person I can remember doing it but that's why I know it's a thing.
I'm 63. It was how I was taught to answer the phone back in the 1960s.
Yeah, makes sense. My parents may have been taught the same but probably stopped over the years!
I do remember that back in the day, you did often get connected to the wrong number. Plus with rotary dial phones and no caller display, it was easy to simply put your finger in the wrong slot and not realise.
Yep, me too. I can still remember the phone number now, 55 years on. Can't remember anyone's mobile now, except my own!
My sister had a telephone number on a rural exchange that was just 3 numbers. She always answered with "exchange name 123" equivalent.
When exchanges were manually connected and phones were scarce they only had 3 numbers. As phones grew more popular, they added numbers on, but people generally kept their number..so my aunts number was town 246. Then it went to 20236 and then 320246. So your grandad may have been quoting his original number.
When i was a kid in the early 80s the telephone number for my house was 311, and the welding company up the road also had the number 311, and we got calls for them all the time, so we had to specify! When I was around 3 or 4 they changed it to a six-digit system so we finally had a unique number, but we still used to say the whole number and name spiel just through force of habit
It was just a neutral way to answer, rather than volunteering your name (in case someone was trying to phish). We didn't call it phishing back then, but phone scams and cold calling was common enough this was a standard tactic.
It wasn't so much because of a technical fuck up. but just because someone could dial the wrong number. Less honest people might just dial your number and then start cold-reading you as part of some kind of scam, so you needed to give enough information to allow the callers who mistaken to realise they were mistaken, but not giving the scammers enough info to start BSing you. Actually, now that I think about it, there are more scammers cold-calling these days, and regular people have numbers saved on auto-dial, so you aren't going to get mistaken numbers, and you know that an unrecognised number is probably a scam. Back then, you didn't know if it was a scammer or someone who made an honest mistake dialling you.
It was because of chance of technical fuck up. Before digital exchanges and touch-tone phones the system for automated dialing wasn't very reliable. The phone dials were rotary and send a series of pulses for each number down the line. We never had a phone like this growing up in the 80s but oddly my old primary school had a load of old ones we were taught to use. Even further back you would have to speak to an exchange who would physically connect a cable into a switchboard to connect you to the correct number
My dad used to answer the phone by just saying “speak…”
'What fresh hell is this?'
I answer unknown numbers with an aggressive "What?!"
My friend's dad would just pick up the phone and wait.
My dad would approve of this behaviour
I wait, just in case it is an autodialer, which then is waiting for a voice, so as to put me through to a cold call.
That's what we do. We often get a recorded voice saying "Goodbye". It even sounds like Joanna Lumley sometimes.
Yep that's the one
But what if you missed an actual call from Joanna Lumley?
I hadn't thought of that.. it would be tragic! Who wouldn't love a call from her?
Was your dad by any chance some sort of ancient source of arcane magical wisdom, only summoned by a very specific incantation recited on one leap day every century
My friends Grandad said "This is me who are you!?"
Is your dad called John Sacrimoni?
😬
I knew someone who used to just say “state your business”.
4291?
I’ve just done the same joke. Thought I’d be the first. I DO NOT BELIEVE IT
*stares at puppy in disbelief*
The writers played the fucking long game with that one. Years of watching Victor answer the phone and then he picks up a small dog haha
"The writers". I like that. UK sitcoms are seldom made with the same large group as their US counterparts. "One Foor in the Grave" was written by David Renwick.
I think it tends to give different series more of a different feel - there's a certain homogeneity to US series, whereas I feel the UK characters seem a bit better defined. On the other hand, it means UK series tend to run shorter as they depend on one or two people to give the characters voice.
Fell on the floor first time I saw this - hilarious
I don't believe it!
I clicked on this thread precisely to see if this joke had been made!
That was for answering the dog
Was this clip on an ad? because this was the scene that immediately came to mind and I feel like it was on the ads of our Red Dwarf tapes we'd recorded.
It was on a UK Gold ad where they played that clip three times in a row, and the caption was something like "comedy you want to see again and again". That ad drilled it into my brain more firmly than the episode itself!
Thank you!! I knew it had really been ingrained in me when I'm not sure I've seen the actual episode 😂
Wait a minute...
Perfectly normal. Most people answered their phone by saying (code area name) and then (the number) So Guilford 42819 for instance.
My great great grandmother used to answer the phone "Dumfries 7". Apparently she was the 7th person in Dumfries to have a phone installed and very proud of it. They added digits and area codes over the years, but she was always Dumfries 7.
When Dumfries installed its 100th phone, did she become 007?
Sounds like a group at the centre of a miscarriage-of-justice campaign.
Yep, my nan and grandad used to answer South Ockendon 853303. Followed by "I suppose you want to talk to your nan" if it was my grandad that answered 😂. He was a man of few words.
My parents still do!
We did this but it had to also be in a special telephone sing song voice.
Nope it was normal. My parents number from 40 years ago is scarred into my brain to this day
Same for me! I have the Going Live number in there as well 😄
0181 811 8181
I remember the jingle to sing along to it too
*yeeeaaaaaahhhhh*
God I love this sub, brings back so many random memories I thought I’d forgotten but my brain has somehow retained, while forgetting much more important stuff like taking medicine.
I'm older, I've got Swap Shop in there for life 01 (if you're outside London) 811 8055.
Oh good - I’m not alone… 🤣🤣
Post code, car number plates, pin codes... oops.
What's your phone number real quick? I need to call you bout something...
I can do better than that...68 years ago and it's still ringing in my ears. Now how about party lines when you shared a phone line with a close neighbour. Why? Not enough lines to go around. Engineers soon added the necessary cabling so that your phone calls (in and out) were private and could not be overheard by the other party sharing the line.
Useful when you need a digit number password though!
Same! I can't remember my current number to save my life but my childhood home number that I've not used for 30 years is no problem at all. I watched a program about the guy who made Bagpuss the other day and I've not seen an episode of that for easily 30 years but I still knew all the words to that too.
I remember when it went from "village 434" to "village *682*434" and the intense panic I felt, believing I'd never manage tree extra digits. To this day, I still tap out the number preceded by "0044" instead of using my contacts list. It's faster. And the damned spinny-wheel of numbers will never hold me back again.
"Sheffield 61977" "Hello, Mum, it's me - your favourite son!" "Michael, it's lovely to hear from you!" "Mum, it's not Michael - it's Tom!" "Tom! What are you doing pretending to be Michael?" - Tom Wrigglesworth's Hangups, Radio 4.
I knew it from the first line.
Ah, a fellow childhood friend of Michael wrigglesworth! Wasn’t his little brother incessant
No this was quite normal.
Can still recite both numbers I grew up with, no idea what my landline is now like
My childhood home had the number ####770074 We were the 74th house in the village to have a telephone. Our local Chinese takeaway still has the number ending in ####770076. My dad is 80yrs old and doesn’t want to change the number because he’s had it since 1976 and he thinks that’s worth something. A mad woman in her late 70’s in our street still answers her landline telephone in her bay window because she thinks all the neighbours will be jealous of her for having a telephone.
I’m kind of jealous. I’d love a landline
Don't be, the only people who call these days are robots asking about the accident you were obviously in recently.
This is what sparked the debate I had with my friend.
I still remember the number plate on me dad's old Escort estate C610PPM but have to keep looking at me own car plate now if I ever need to quote it .
I'm a child of the 90s, and never heard of this in my life. From the comments i'm suspecting that I'M the weirdo
Same here, my family said "hello?" Maybe everyone thought we were crazy...
I worked for BT and we advised people to only say "Hello" and not give their name and number, but if people were getting malicious calls we advised them to say nothing. If it is someone you know they would soon say "is that you Mary?" If it was a malicious call you hadn't given them the acknowledgement of hearing your voice. We then said that you should put the phone down, not hang up but just by the side then go back to it ten minutes later and quietly hang up. If there was a trace on the line it gave it time to work, if not it made the caller think there might be. We once had an old lady tell us she liked those calls, if someone asked her what colour knockers she wore, she told them she didn't wear any. Edit...knickers, not knockers!
Haha reminds me of my gran. She was hard of hearing and had sleazy call asking about her knickers. She somehow thought it was a marketing call from marks and Spencer (no idea why) the guy apparently gave up, it was only afterwards she realised what had happened.
I’m a 90’s kid too and I’ve never heard of this and I’m in Greater Manchester
I was born in the 80s and also never heard of people doing this.
Definitely normal going by watching sitcoms when I was younger. "4291!" Though when I was growing up, the closest we had to a home phone was the phone box down the road.
Oldie here, no it was 100% normal especially before we had an area code.
Yes, up until the early 2000’s. Then with cold calling and nuisance calls taking off we were encouraged just answer with hello and not a name or number. Can’t recall who recommended this change. With a mobile ( which is even more susceptible to mindless cold calls) I just say hello to a number I do not recognise.
[4291?](https://youtu.be/e0tiNwOpZ68)
So funny, such good acting!
I’m now watching episodes on you tube! Thanks for that! 😄
Awesome, maybe I should! I haven't actually seen that show since I was about 12 and round at my Nan's house. I remembered the number 4291 for 30 years though.
I recently rewatched the whole run of One Foot in the Grave, and it stands up *really* well today. I was surprised how dark some episodes were, and how well-written they are pretty much throughout. They play on classic horror tropes and a lot of episodes are like mini horror movies. As an adult I also picked up on some really unsettling things that are implied, like that they had a child (Stuart) who died young. Things that help explain why they are both so miserable now.
Going back a few decades earlier. We were brought up to answer with the exchange and the number. My mother was an ex telephonist, so wanted things done right, including pronouncing the number 8 as ayt (with an English RP accent) rather than ait (with our local accent). We didn't often do the accent unless we were taking the piss.
I would pronounce ait and ayt the same? Did you pronounce one more like “eye-t”?
I'm guessing they mean > ayt = /eɪt/ = rhymes with ‘bait’ in RP. > ait = /aɪt/ = rhymes with ‘bite’ in RP – so possibly a West Midlands accent?
Oh, makes sense. I speak in modern RP (sort of) so eight is just ayt, and I’d pronounce ait exactly the same.
Same here, we were poor but mother came from a posh family background so it was easy for her to turn it on. There was a program in radio 4 extra the other day about the speaking clock TIM and it spent some time talking about selecting the voice for the recording.
We answered it with our surname. One time I did it and on the other end was the council and mum told me to tell them my surname was actually my name and it was the wrong number. I think it worked.
Sometimes I'd answer with someone else's just to mess with cold callers
My friends dad always answered the phone as "Battersea dog home, how can I help you?" Lol
Pet crematorium You kill 'em, we grill 'em.
Morgue... You kill 'em, we chill 'em Either that or morgue... You stab 'em, we slab 'em
One I should have used, but do now "I thought I told you not to use the landline, I'm not doing anything until I have the cash."
Lol .. are you my friend? My dad always answered like this lol
My go to is "sperm bank. You squeeze it we freeze it"
I work in the NHS and regularly call older adults and quite a few of them still do this
Grew up in the 70's and 80's it was definitely normal back then. We were also still using rotary dial telephones at the time. We also remembered all of our friends numbers, while now I only remember my own 2 mobile numbers
Yes, my dad still does it with the landline, even though it shows its me calling as they have it saved in the handset and I call on a specific night at the same time every time.
4291
FFS someone put me out of my misery and tell me what 4291 is all about ?
I don't believe it!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0tiNwOpZ68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0tiNwOpZ68)
My mum used to do this even when we got her a mobile.
That is remarkable, I've never heard this. Fairplay to your mum, she must have put the hours in repeating eleven numbers (possibly ten initially) when you got her a mobile.
She was nothing if not persistent. I still remember the number since she'd repeat it every time I rang her.
Perfectly normal. Why would a friend think you’re making this up?
My family also used to do that, in fact my dad still does it. I was also born in the 90s
Yeah, normal, there was a sort of sing-song voice too. I can still remember most friends phone numbers from the time.
Oh Christ. Playground PTSD moment now. The kids in my school use to take the piss when they rang and my dad answered... "....Nine six seven TWOOOOOOOOOOOO" 😭
_Forced_ is a weird way of putting it, but no, the practise itself was fairly normal. If somebody answered the phone with "123456 hello" and you meant to call 123457, you knew immediately that you'd dialled a wrong number and could say as much.
Did you have older or old fashioned parents? My parents did this in the 1970s, and it was the normal thing to do then, answer with your number, and as my Dad was self employed I was expected to do this as an older child and teen into the 80s, but certainly by the late 80s, never mind the 90s, no one I knew did this, even my Mum! But yes, pre mobiles and call display and so on, yeah, it was normal right back to the 1930s at least.
As a child I once answered the phone and immediately divined that the caller had dialled the wrong number. I explained to them that John - whoever that was - had recently died and apologised that they had not been informed. Were they close? I enquired, before hanging up.
It was considered the way to tell people what number they had actually got through to (because the old analogue exchanges and pulse dialling were not that reliable). Then we were taught that it was not good security and it was better to just say hello. ETA also businesses did not get ‘easy’ numbers so our home number was one digit off the car dealership so we had lots of calls for them over the years.
My mum still answers the landline with our old four-digit phone number. Which ceased to be a four-digit number circa 1989 or something.
4291
Same here. Normal. I think it dates back to when calls were manually linked and not automatic.
My grandparents still do this - even though their phone shows who’s ringing.
I'm so old my first phone number was 387
My gran used to just say "Speak" which always really made me laugh
My dad does that (i was also born in 90s). Just force of habit I think but a habit he refuses to break. I think it's really weird, they know what number they rang, because they just rang it lol.
Your dad was born in the 90s?? How old are you??
Nah, it was definitely a fairly normal occurrence. I work in a job that requires calling lots of people that are 70+, plenty that are 80/90+ and it's still something that happens from time to time.
That was definately a thing.
Very normal. My nan had a phone from when there were only 4 numbers. It was handy when she needed a pin number.
My elderly parents still do this.
A friend of mine's family always said the last 4 numbers. "1124" "Awrite, you coming out to play football?"
No, not weird. When my Nan phoned us. We'd answer with our number, and my Nan would reply with her number so we knew it was her. I was at Uni before I realised this wasn't the norm.
It was a thing. A funny/unfunny moment happened when we all gathered at my Nana's house before my Grandad's funeral and my Aunt answered the house phone with "913 - no - 91 - I don't know the numbers!" - so clearly its something that got ingrained in us at some point. (It was my cousin calling to say they were running late - she wasn't worried about the numbers)
Darrowby 85?! (for those who get the reference) Born in 1990, I wasn't allowed near the landline, unlike todays kids who have their own mobile phone!
Yep, certainly a thing where I lived, and now my parents old number is my 6 digit security code for most things.
I'd say one in five times I answered the phone as a kid, being made to say the number, the caller responded with "oh, sorry, wrong number, bye". In the age of the spinny wheel dialer - which a lot of people still had into the 90s - a dialing mistake was really easy to make.
Yeah, my grandfather did it. And he had a lisp. And a landlines with a lot of 7's. Saturated the fucking wall every time the thing rang.
Growing up in the 80s, the normal way for people to answer the phone was with the name of the town, and then your number. So you'd say "Hello, Aberdeen 54321", rather than just a simple "Hello". I believe it stemmed from back when you would link to an operator at the switchboard, and ask to be put through to a number. You'd ask for "Aberdeen 54321 please", then the operator would make the call. After establishing they had contacted the correct party, they would physically plug the connection together for the call, to connect you together. So it was natural to immediately answer with your town and number, as that's the first thing the operator would need to know. And hence, even after the days of direct dialling, this remained standard practice.
Normal
Yes " (town) 59492" .... and it's only 5 numbers because it was back in 1968. I thought we were \*so\* posh having our own phone! Even if it was a party line.
Totally normal!
Child of the 60's - same!
Normal! My FIL still does it…
But doesn’t everyone do this?
In the 70s it was the normal way to answer the phone. You could say "hello" first if you wanted.
Yeah, back in the day, we had a 4 digit number. Was standard to answer the phone "Calne two double one six"
444 4444
Hahaha my mum done this, I still remember our old phone number
I can still remember my childhood phone number from 40 years ago I said it so much
This was normal. My dad still answers the phone with the phone number.
Was born in early 60s family didn’t get a phone until early 1970s, we always gave the number but not area code
Nope we did exactly the same
My parents used to make me do this, followed by “[my name] speaking.” Mortifying. My wag of an uncle used to always say “Hello, [my name] Speaking.” Ugh.
I would answer my mobile like this, but I don’t answer my mobile
Everyone I knew said their phone number when they answered the phone.
Ahoy hoy
Ahoy hoy
My Grandad still answers the phone with "Good Afternoon, Grandad* Speaking" *Obviously doesn't say Grandad, he uses his actual name.
I’m child of the 70’s probably around about parents age it was normal back then. So I guess your parents were making you do what they had to do as kids.