Calling: Tampa time and temperature hotline: (352-629-1212)

Following description belongs to Tampa Bay Times: More than a million people each month dial a phone number to get the time and temperature, said John Lochridge, the man bringing such phone lines back from the dead. [ Shutterstock ] By Christopher SpataTimes staff Published Apr. 13|Updated Apr. 26 The first phone number I learned was my grandparents’ landline. The second was time and temperature. After I’d annoyed Grandma thoroughly, someone taught me (352) 629-1212 — one of only three phone numbers I still know offhand. It was mind-blowing and mysterious to 6-year-old me, this robot voice with all the info that lived in the analog lines. Somehow, it still kind of is. Time and temperature phone lines receive more than a million calls each month from across the U.S. That includes thousands of calls to three recently restored lines in Tampa Bay. With smartphones and their precise atomic clocks and weather apps, why would anyone dial a number for such basic facts? John Lochridge of Memory Lane Communications says the question misses the point. “What’s the fun,” Lochridge said, “in just getting it off your phone screen?” Most of those lines would likely have faded away altogether if not for a small handful of devotees like him. Many were already dead. The dusty, Nixon-era equipment that automated them failed in the back rooms of banks and newspapers a decade ago with no one willing to maintain it. When Lochridge learned the line he’d grown up calling in Dallas was shutting down in 2011, the telecommunications engineer spent two years figuring out how to bring it back himself. The response was so positive that he’s been on a gleeful quest to resurrect defunct time and temperature lines across the U.S. ever since. John Lochridge is with Memory Lane Communications. John Lochridge is with Memory Lane Communications. [ Courtesy of John Lochridge ] He now owns hundreds of lines and counting — from cities like New York and Chicago to Arctic Circle outposts like Deadhorse, Alaska, with a population of around 50. Some folks will read this and get a nostalgic kick out of dialing anew the lines that had gone dead by the mid-2010s: (813) 622-1212 (Tampa), (727) 894-6666 (St. Petersburg) or (727) 447-6611 (Clearwater). Others already know those lines are working again because they never stopped trying to call. Time and temperature, for me, was the start of a long fascination with the phone. In middle school I’d hang out at a corner store pay phone dialing random 800 numbers and collect-calling friends. I browsed the phone book on the couch, chatted up operators and pulled houseguests into marathon crank call sessions. I kept a list of citywide pay phone numbers. A phone near the restrooms at the mall was a favorite for testing the strangers that answered: I’m in the last stall, out of paper. Can you help? The pranks weren’t about sowing chaos as much as they were a way to get an auditory glimpse into forbidden bars and unknown pizza kitchens and strangers’ living rooms. Just as my habit of calling time and temperature four times a day — an ancestor to compulsively opening Twitter — probably wasn’t about the weather. I called my hometown time and temperature line into adulthood, long after I moved away. It’s a great way to test your signal or pretend you’re on the phone if you want to avoid someone. It finally stopped working a few years ago, as I’d expected. But now and then I tried it, just in case. About a year ago, it was suddenly back. Seeking the source of this small miracle, I connected with RTI Media founder Bruce Robertson. The former radio announcer provides the distinguished voice callers hear today. Today is Friday, April 8, the current time 11:04 a.m. and the temperature 63 degrees. He also sells the tech that makes modern time and temperature lines like Lochridge’s work. I told him how I’d never completely stopped calling. He said that’s common. He described a client who’d taken control of an old line in Kentucky. The guy plugged it in but made no announcement that it was back. “In the first week he got 14,000 calls,” Robertson said. “That means the people had been calling for months, even when the service was gone. It’s a habit-based thing.” There’s a thin line between habit and ritual. And there’s comfort in finding that a system that was always there has continued on. Right where you left it. Dutiful, even if no one needs it. And of course it’s a bit of cheap nostalgia. I can’t deny that telephones — if you can imagine it — used to be fun. For instance, a classmate turned me on to a supposedly haunted “doppelganger number,” where everything I said took on an eerie echo. (I later learned these were used by phone companies to test call quality.) It’s why I still take photos of pay phones today... Heres the link to read the rest as its too long to fit in the description: https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture...