Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady

There was a time when, in our particular area in the state of California, if I said I had “called popcorn!” any local would have known exactly what I meant, while anybody from far afield might be baffled as to what I was talking about.

“POPCORN” spelled out on a phone dial pad translates to the phone number 767-2676, and if you dialed that number in northern California you would get the speaking clock… or the time lady if you prefer… a recorded voice that would tell you in ten second increments, “At the tone, Pacific standard time will be seven fifteen and 20 seconds” followed by an obvious beep.

Somebody nicely recorded it before the service went down in 2007, so you can experience it yourself.

Technically, you didn’t have to dial out “POPCORN” in full, 767 followed by any four digits would do it.  The prefix 767 was reserved at every local phone switch for just that.  And you didn’t have to dial an area code… though, for much of my youth in northern California you didn’t have to dial an area code to reach most places, there being way more possible phone numbers than phones at that point, something that would change drastically due to both population increase and an explosion in the demand for phone numbers.

The whole 767 thing was, as I am told, unique to northern California, making us a bit of a plague on the rest of the country as we would show up in another state and want to check the time, dial 767-2676, only to get some exasperated person answering the phone keen to lecture people from our state that the speaking clock had a different number in that particular jurisdiction.

How were we to know?

Anyway, there is a long history of speaking clocks detailed over at Wikipedia, which includes mention of POPCORN as well as the earliest versions of such a service which required an actual person so sit there and read the time to all callers.

How many guys propositioned her when seeking the time?

Image credit

Thinking about it gives me a tiny pang of nostalgia.  But since we almost universally walk around with smart phones these days, having to call a number to find out the time is pretty much an unnecessary redundancy at this point.  Even  non-smart phone have the time on the face, provided by the phone system network time with all has to run off the same clock.

This, if nothing else, put an end to people arguing about whose watch or clock was correct.

You think I am kidding about that?  Time isn’t even a real thing, just what we say it is, yet we’ll fight over it.

I have, on multiple occasions, been in meetings with grown ass adults and have had somebody walk in five minutes late and then insist they were on time because they set their watch to POPCORN just last night so everybody else was just early.

Now nobody has a watch… except one of those watches that connects to your smart phone… and everybody has a smart phone… at least in the meetings I attend… and one tangible improvement this has brought to life is that now when somebody is late they just say “sorry” and we move on without having to divert a room full of people into a discussion over whose time piece is correct.

Okay, we’re about at the point where you are once again thinking, “Cool story bro, but do you have a point here?  Wasn’t this supposed to be a series of stories about you?”

And yes, I am getting there, and to a very specific story in a very specific moment of time.

At some point in July or August of 1980 something happened to the POPCORN phone line.  Generally when you dialed the time it picked up right away and you started hearing the time lady speak at the next 10 second interval.  I am going to guess that some update was pushed… and in those days you had to fill out a form to justify every byte of data you used for your code… somewhere I have and example form from a phone mail systems showing a rejection because the use of an additional 3Kbytes was deemed a flagrant and outrageous waste of memory for a particular update… that changed how the answering routine for the system worked.

With this update… and that is speculation, but seems reasonable… rather than being connected directly to the sound output when the line was answered, you were put in something akin to a holding state until the time read output started a new loop, at which point you were connected.

As it turned out, when you were in this particular pre-connection state you were effectively on a multi-party line and could hear and speak to anybody else who happened to call POPCORN at that very moment.

I am not sure who figured this out, nor how long it was there before I noticed it… despite its ubiquity, it isn’t like you needed to call the speaking clock on a daily basis unless you were prepping to get into an argument about whose watch was correct… I just recall going to the phone and dialing 767-2676 to get the time and being greeted, when the line was answered, but a bunch of people yelling things into their own phones.

It was, effectively, an actual, if very limited duration, party line.  Being probably 15 years old at that point, I hung up and called back as soon as the time lady intruded on the fun, listening to a few brief seconds of chaos, then hanging up and calling back yet again.

Cheers for flat rate local area dialing plans!  This service will come into play again later.

So I sat there dialing POPCORN over and over… this pre-dates speed dial on any standard phone, but at least we had a TouchTone phone at that point, so I could just pound out 767 followed by any four digits to get back on the line.

In the middle of this, on repeated dialing, I can hear in the midst of all of the noise people shouting out their phone numbers.  Because of course people were doing that.  It was a happier time… and it was pretty clear from the voices that this was all bored young people in the middle of summer.

I heard one girl shout out her number, which had the same prefix as our own… though I suspect, with my later acquired knowledge of the phone system that we were limited to hearing people calling into the same central office location and, maybe even the same phone switch in that CO… and noted that number down and, once I had hung up on the time lady for probably the 20th time, I called the number.

And the girl answered.  Then, after a short but still awkward conversation where we exchanged first names, we found out that we lived just a couple of blocks from each other.  So I ended up walking over to her house to meet her.

This is where we get into me being an awkward teenage boy who was pretty much undateable until I was in my 20s.  Her name was Barbara, she was tall and beautiful in that was 14 year old girls can be, glowing with big blonde hair.  I was very much taken with her.  She was going to be a freshman at the same high school that I was returning to as a sophomore, so it was almost in a way as if the universe was pointing me at an opportunity.

But I was, as noted, also an awkward 15 year old boy with poor social skill who played Dungeons & Dragons with his fellow nerds, and so nothing ever came of it, in part because our paths almost never crossed after that meeting.  We didn’t have any classes together.  Her parents drove her to school so I never saw her on my walk to or from that destination.  And we had no social overlap at all.

It was one of several encounters that I completely blew due to me being me, both awkward and oblivious.

The one link between us came out later when, telling this story to a girlfriend a couple years down the road… somebody I also went to high school with and with whom I apparently had not completely blown all future opportunities… I found out that Barbara was her absolute middle school nemesis, a sordid story of friend circles and betrayal and ostracism and whatever.

Maybe I dodged a bullet with Barbara after all.

But, I guess the point of all of this sums up to the fact that I was meeting girls online before we even knew what online really was.  Dial up dating of a sorts.

As for the popcorn lady social circle, somebody clearly complained about hearing all sorts of crazy people shouting into the phone when dialing up to find out the time as Pacific Bell fixed whatever was allowing this unintentional social experiment by the time classes started at the end of summer.