How Many Phone Numbers Do You Know?

author:
I was thinking this morning about what I might do if I lost my cellphone. Who could I call? Even though I have been taking steps to backup my life, and streamline the organization of my contacts, email, documents, etc., I haven’t reached the point where I have phone numbers synced to my computer’s address book. Though I have two backup drives, and regularly upload stuff to my web server and to GMail just to be safe, the one thing I have backed up nowhere is any sort of comprehensive contact list that includes phone numbers and addresses. Sure, I’ve got most of the email addresses stored in GMail, but that’s it.

Why? Well, partly because I haven’t found a way to do it that doesn’t require manually typing number after number into Apple’s Address Book, since I can’t figure out how to export the vCard from my phone, though I know how to do it in the opposite direction. Laziness, clearly.

And I realized this morning that losing my phone would be a huge problem. The information contained on it, and my SIM card exists nowhere else. How easy would it be to retrieve this information if lost? Well, let’s do an inventory of the phone numbers I have committed to memory.
  • My home phone number from childhood (inactive since 1997)
  • My best friend from childhood’s home phone number (inactive since 2000-ish)
  • My ex-girlfriend’s home phone number
  • My ex-bandmate’s home phone number(Just the drummer. As far as I know, only his parents use this anymore.)
  • My home number in Pahrump (now just my father’s number)
  • The second line in my home in Pahrump, which was used, fairly exclusively, for dial-up internet access (which I’m not sure my father still has)
  • My girlfriend’s old cellphone number (though I can find her new one through my account with T-mobile, now that we share a cell plan)
  • My Cape Cod-dwelling grandparents’ phone number
  • My work phone number
  • My apartment phone number
  • My cellphone number
  • 1-800-Metrocard
  • 911
And that’s it.

That leaves a ton of numbers I would have to recover (I have well over 150 stored in my phone). Most of my family, all of my friends, my roommate, all my clients, favorite restaurants, past employers, my doctor - not good.

Not good at all.

Do you memorize phone numbers anymore? Or have a written phonebook? Or computer backups of your contacts? Do you automatically sync? Or do the manual thing?

How much would you lose if you lost your phone?

Let me know in the comments.