In 1966, Wilson Pickett recorded "634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)", which also appears in the soundtrack of the movie Blues Brothers 2000.
So-called "interchangeable central office codes" with 0's or 1's in the second or third positions were rare at the time, but they had been allowable under the North American Numbering Plan since the mid-1970's.
[4] In 1992, filmmaker Michael Moore unwittingly included footage of himself reciting his telephone number in the documentary Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint.
[5] The all-girl singing group The Marvelettes had an early Motown hit record in 1962 with "Beechwood 4-5789", written by Marvin Gaye, William "Mickey" Stevenson and George Gordy.
The makers of 2003 film Bruce Almighty used 776-2323 as a telephone number for God (played by Morgan Freeman).
776 is not a fictitious exchange in other area codes, where subscribers with the matching number were inundated with callers asking for "God".
In Colorado the calls were misdirected to KDMN radio; in Sanford, North Carolina the number belongs to a church.
In Germany, the 1981 Spider Murphy Gang song "Skandal im Sperrbezirk" ("Scandal in the Blocked Zone") contains a telephone number, zweiunddreißig, sechzehn, acht: 32 16 8.
Singer Günther Sigl said in an interview that the song became "at one time, the most famous phone number in Germany."
This was for a time an active cell phone number, which would play a message urging fans to keep watching the show and to vote for it at the People's Choice Awards.
The editor was inundated with calls, became a minor pop sensation himself, and sued Dutt but lost in court.
The song tells the story of a man who decides to call all the women in his phonebook from a public phone.
In 1998, Queens of the Stone Age released the song Regular John, which includes the number 86278-263789.
Nevada uses 555 phone numbers for TTY (teletypewriter) or TDD (telecommunication device for the deaf) only lines.
[27] The reservation applies to all geographic North American Numbering Plan area codes.
555 or a variant remains potentially valid outside North America; New Zealand uses mobile *555 to report traffic collisions.
950-xxxx are reserved as local access numbers for feature group "B" alternate long-distance carriers.
Early Bell System publications which needed to illustrate a telephone with a number displayed on it commonly used (311) 555-2368, and for multi-button phones, -2369, -2370, -2371, etc.
[6] Fictional Telecom has reserved voice over IP numbers in the 206 (Seattle), 323 (Los Angeles), 415 (San Francisco), and 646 (New York) area codes for use in films, TV and radio dramas.
Ofcom also reserves blocks of mobile phone (07700 900xxx), freephone (0808 157 0xxx), and premium rate (0909 879 0xxx) numbers for drama use.