SW SKELLUM LA

Anyone who has ever seen the 1993 Clint Eastwood movie “In the Line of Fire” knows exactly what that little anagram means.  If you haven’t seen the movie, well I’m about to spoil a little piece of it for you.  But hey, it came out 16 years ago.  It’s about time you learned the secret.

The “SW” and “LA” are just what you’d think – “SouthWest” and “Los Angeles”.  But the SKELLUM represents a seven digit phone number – an anagram to remember the numbers without actually remembering the numbers.  See, I didn’t spoil it all that much…

Sixteen years ago, this would have worked perfectly from any phone – push button or even rotary.  Ten years ago, this would still have worked with just about any cell phone.  But what about today?

I ran into a man at a poker table a couple weeks ago who was unable to make a phone call from his BlackBerry8800 (pictured above).  The phone number he was given used an anagram to make the numbers easier to remember.  The trouble is, not all BlackBerry’s have standard phone keypads – in fact, today many of them have QWERTY keyboards to make them more like mini-laptops and less like phones.

Well, when a phone number is converted to an anagram, it is done using the normal phone layout – #1 is blank, #2 is “ABC”, #3 is “DEF” and so on.  But if you try to dial an anagram using a QWERTY keyboard, you might end up with A falling on #4, B on #8 and C on #7.  In the case of the 8800, the “A” isn’t even on a number, it’s on a question mark.  Since phones are dialed by number and not letter or punctuation, this is a serious problem.

We may have seen the last of the anagram phone number.  With more and more people switching to smartphones as their primary means of communication, the old “ABC/DEF/GHI” phone layouts are starting to go away.  Some phones, like the BlackBerry Storm for example, have a visual layout of their phone pad which represents standard number/letter settings.

I’d recommend always getting a phone number by using the actual numbers anyway.  Let’s face it – it’s not hard to write down a phone number or punch it into your cell phone, call and immediately hang up, then just search the call history when you need to find it.