I know this demands explaining, so I'll be specific.
Apart from these calls from the rating services, I keep receiving calls on my home phone from people who set out to dial a certain undertaker—I beg his pardon, funeral director. We have the same exchange, in fact his number differs from mine only in that the first of his last four digits is a zero while my corresponding one is a nine.
Of course by now you've put your finger on it. These people are dialing the under—funeral director because, in the current colloquialism, someone's number's up. They misdial because they're unconsciously saying nein to the zero of death.
I've analyzed both my home phone number and my office phone number in this fashion, figuring out what their components connote singly and as gestalts. And I can see why these fortuitous combinings command attention, why these numbers leap out of the directory pages right at you. Privately I call such a number a common denominator with a way of accreting its numerator.
I hope you're not laughing at me.
After all, when you remember what number is, what's happening follows naturally. Number's a language we use to blaze our way through the wood of reality. Without number we couldn't say what is more or less probable, we couldn't signpost our path. But using number is like trying to detect the emission of a photon without having to receive that photon. The difficulty lies in trying to get number at least one remove from the font of all language—the human mind. Possibly we'll come closest to order, be at one with reality, when we can order number—at the level of statistical probability—to be truly random, at one with chaos.
At any rate, there you have it. I'd like to go into greater detail but I'm afraid to.
Before my phone numbers up and atted 'em I was content merely to tune out the noisome and the fulsome and sigh to myself, "That's life. You ask for beer and get water."
That is, I thought I was content.