Last week I was on the phone scheduling a carpet cleaning visit with a local company.  I wanted the technician to come to the house within a couple of days.  Once we decided on a date and time, the agent on the phone asked for the best phone number for the technician to call when he was ready to begin his trek to our house.  I gave them my cell phone number.  Then, they asked if I had a secondary number.  Since my husband would be getting off of work a little early that day, I gave them his cell phone number as the secondary number.  When I was saying his number out loud, I was reminded that our numbers read the same except for the last number in the sequence of numbers.  His cell phone number ends in a one and my number ends in a two.  People often comment about our numbers being so similar and sometimes his friends hit a two instead of a one and call me expecting him to answer.

The similarities in our cell phone numbers are not accidental.  When we got these numbers, I asked the representative who was setting up the accounts to find two numbers that would be easy for my young children to remember.  It was an odd request, but the representative agreed to make the effort to find two similar numbers.  The agent found number sequences with repeating numbers and that were the same except the numbers would end in a one and a two.  Beautiful! My children learned the numbers with ease.

I did the same thing with our home phone numbers every time we moved and set up service.  When the kids were younger, the home phone numbers were always sequential numbers or repeating numbers.  Once, we had a home phone number that would have been a great rummy hand.  It had two eights and four fives.  I think it was 884-5555.  Genius!  My five year old daughter had no trouble remembering her home phone number and I was thrilled.  I have encountered so many people who have said things like, “How did you get such easy to learn phone numbers?” or “Aren’t you lucky?”

It was not a coincidence.  It was not a lucky draw.  It was planned and designed.  Excellent parenting is not happenstance and neither is ensuring the safety and security of your children.  Don’t shy away from asking for phone numbers that your babies can remember.  You are the consumer and they serve at your pleasure even if they don’t know it.  Ask and ask again.  Then, ask for a supervisor if they continue to have difficulty understanding their role.  They are villagers tasked with providing excellent service that enables you to enhance the plan of safety and security for your babies.