Prepare for the Era of Area Code Snobbery [Trends]

Unbeknownst to this New Yorker, in the event you live inside the Manhattan and don’t have a 212 area code, you’re a licensed nobody. Says one privileged 212-haver: ” I don’t pick up 917, 646, and certainly not 347.” Ughhhh.

While Elaine Benes grappled with the difficulties of the non-212 area code years ago, a post on the WSJ’s Metropolis blog explains how the 212 area code is now becoming a status symbol inside the The Big Apple tech scene, like some really cool Big apple Foursquare badge. Unsurprisingly, the cool kids at Foursquare are right at the guts of 212 mania:

” I were eager about it for decades,” [Foursquare co-founder Naveen] Selvadurai said. After moving to Big apple from Connecticut, he had to get a new phone and carrier. ” I swapped my number to something new – 646 – to check my Manhattan billing address but I truly secretly wanted a 212,” he says. ” But I never really went after it.”

That is, until Selvadurai noticed that one of his Foursquare employees had a 212 number. When fellow Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley noted that Twitter co-founder (and Foursquare angel investor) Jack Dorsey, a California resident, ” rolls 212,” Selvadurai had heard enough. (Crowley admits to coveting a 212 himself. ” Sure, I’d upgrade. Your complete cool kids are doing it,” he says.)

The idea here’s that a 212 area code signifies your status as a real, old-school New Yorker-person who was around when Times Square was packed with sex workers in preference to tourists. Obviously, that was way before cellphones were around first of all, so this complete business is pretty silly. One internet dude described its appeal as being similar to that of ” fake vintage T-shirts,” which sounds about right. Yet, as the WSJ points out, 212 numbers can fetch up to $2000 on Ebay.

I guess it’s unsurprising, in this era of jockeying for the shortest Twitter handle, to wish the best mobile phone number around. But I believe I’m going to begin screening 212 calls anyway. [WSJ]

Image credit alq666

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