Carlo Allegri, National Post Ian Angus, head of Angus Telemanagement Group, was hired to sell the idea of 10-digit dialing to Toronto. While some callers are seething, Angus says most are already comfortable with the transition.

There is a rage gripping telephone users in Toronto. They pick up their phone to order a pizza, or call a friend down the street, or book a hairdresser's appointment and are greeted by a prim woman's voice that says: "The call you are making is a local 10-digit call. Next time, please dial the area code before the seven-digit number you are calling. Your call will now be completed. This is a recording."

"Aaarghh!" screams the phone user, slams down the receiver, and dials again.

Phone rage is not new. In the 1940s, James Thurber, who wrote for The New Yorker, was enraged by the number-changing of his day. Mr. Thurber imagined a fictitious Connecticut Telephone Company official named Rudwooll Y. Peffifoss who wants to get back at the world for his horrible name (the Y stands for Yurmurm). Snarling, Mr. Peffifoss spends his days changing the numbers of unsuspecting phone customers. He then goes home "to kick around his children's rabbits for a while before sitting down to dinner."

The grief wrought by Mr. Peffifoss is nothing compared with the telephone-number shakeups sweeping North America. Pagers, faxes, modems and cellphones have voraciously hoovered up remaining telephone numbers. In Toronto, this means that as of March 5 everyone within the 416 area will need to dial 10 digits for all local calls, or the calls won't go through. The change makes way for a new area code, 647, which will be assigned to new numbers and co-exist in the same geographic area as 416. The telephone company calls this an "overlay."

"I don't like it, but what do I have to say?" said a Toronto cab driver yesterday, expressing the city's resignation to the change. "They don't make things easier, they make them harder. We're living in a crazy, nutty world."

Other Canadians may well gloat, but this blight is soon to spread across the country; 905, the area code created in 1993 for the belt around Toronto, is getting a "distributed overlay," 289, as of June; Vancouver's 604 is getting a "concentrated overlay," 778, in November; Montreal, which added the 450 area code in January, 1999, for numbers off the island will need another one in June, 2003, for numbers on the island; the 613 code that includes the Kingston-Ottawa area and 519 that covers London and Windsor in Southwestern Ontario will need additional codes in about five years.

And, at the current pace, Toronto will need another area code in about seven or eight years, says Glenn Pilley, director of the Canadian Numbering Administration, the Ottawa agency that oversees the country's phone numbers.

Mr. Pilley says the backlash to 10-digit dialling is no different than it was when the surrounding areas of Toronto were split into the 905 area code eight years ago.

"People who got the new number with the 905 area code weren't happy and those who kept their existing ones were," he said, adding that, in the Toronto area, more than half the calls made each day are across the borders of 905 and 416, where dialers must dial 10 digits. "Why would we confuse people with having to decide to dial seven or 10 digits?" he asked.

According to phone company officials, there are approximately 7.5 million possible phone numbers in a given area code. There would be more, except phone numbers can't start with 0 or 1.

At any one time, about one million of the available numbers are not in use due to people who have moved or have had their lines disconnected. Blocks of numbers are also put aside for sub divisions that are under construction and for service providers such as Telus, Sprint and AT&T.

Ian Angus, head of Angus Telemanagement Group in the Toronto suburb of Ajax, shares the blame for the shortage of numbers: He has a home phone, a line for his daughter, a fax line and two cellphones, plus office lines. Hired jointly by the telephone companies serving Toronto (a.k.a. the Toronto Telecom Alliance), it is Mr. Angus's job to explain to a furious city the reasons behind 10-digit dialling.

Why, Torontonians want to know, couldn't the city do as Manhattan has done? Manhattan has a new overlay area code, 646, but retains seven-digit calling within an area code. Chicago and Los Angeles, meanwhile, have simply created new area codes in geographic areas of the cities, and retained seven-digit dialling within area codes.

The 10-digit decision, Mr. Angus says, dates to 1996. The Canadian Numbering Administration, seeing a crisis looming in Toronto phone numbers, ordered the roughly 15 companies in the city with the power to issue phone numbers to create a 416 Numbering Plan Area Relief Committee. Some two dozen engineers and technicians, meeting in downtown hotels over a period of two years, hashed out the plan that is now being born. The meetings were public, Mr. Angus says, although no one except phone company geeks showed up.

"There were lots of focus groups back in 1996," Mr. Angus says. "Nobody really wanted 10-digit dialling, but also nobody wanted their telephone number to change."

The committee looked at dividing the city down the middle geographically, with one half 416 and the other half 647. In phone company terms, this is a "split" as opposed to an "overlay."

Mr. Pilley at the Canadian Numbering Administration noted that most customers would prefer a split to an overlay, as long as they don't end up with a new area code themselves.

"There was a survey done in 416 back in 1996, actually. And [respondents] were asked, 'What would you prefer, a split where you dial seven digits, or an overlay where you're going to have to dial 10? Of course, everybody said, 'Oh, we want the split.'

"Then the next question was, 'OK, you get the new area code, what would you rather have?' Everybody said, 'Oh, we want the overlay; we can dial 10 digits.' "

The relief committee members eventually decided a split wasn't feasible for reasons other than public relations. For one thing, some switches on one side of town handle calls on the other side. As well, businesses didn't want to wake up one morning and have two area codes in different parts of the same city, Mr. Angus said, and the city government couldn't figure out how to adapt its central switching system to multiple area codes.

Also, even had the phone companies switched half the 416 numbers to 647, they could not have right away assigned the freed-up 416 numbers to new customers (known in the business as "recycling"), because of wrong-number chaos. "It takes months before you can recycle the numbers," Mr. Angus explains.

Furthermore, splitting the city in two assumes phone number demand will grow at the same rate on both sides of the line, which may not be the case.

Other solutions, such as assigning new area codes to wireless devices, as has been tried in the United States, would have required every cellphone owner to trade in their physical telephone, and could also have backfired if new demand did not come from wireless users.

In the United States, introduction of new area codes in recent years has resulted in a patchwork of splits and overlays. While some states have gone entirely to 10-digit dialling, others have a mixture of seven and 11-digit dialling (which involves dialling the "1" for long distance).

"Ten-digit dialling for all calls, or local calls, is something you don't even think about after the first couple of days," argued Barry Duncan, manager of number resource planning and engineering for Verizon, a telephone giant that oversees area-code changes in the northeastern United States.

In his territory, he explains, 10-digit dialling is now mandatory in the entire state of Maryland and in the 703 code in suburban Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., where the Pentagon and other major institutions are located. It is also mandatory in the Philadelphia area, as well as in the western part of Pennsylvania. In a few months, western Massachusetts, including Boston, will go to 10 digits.

Greater New York City, however, has five area codes, including 212 and its overlay 646, 718 and its overlay 347, and 917, which was initially a wireless code.

But the state's consumer-protection commission has so far won a court fight to keep seven-digit dialling in the city, a fight Mr. Duncan says has resulted in tremendous confusion.

"The really bad part is, if anybody forgets to give the area code, or to ask for it, then you get the wrong customer," he says. "And we have a tremendous amount of misdialled calls in New York because there's no way to tell the difference in two identical seven-digit numbers if you forget or don't know to dial the area code."

One customer in the area has answered more than 6,000 misdialled calls, and Mr. Duncan cites a hair salon that gets hundreds of calls a day for a credit-card authorization line because they have the same seven-digit number, but different area codes.

In Toronto, the relief committee modelled the new system on Maryland, which implemented a 10-digit local dialling system without incident, Mr. Angus says. And he insists Toronto is already comfortable with 10-digit local dialling.

"This has been one of the smoothest transitions on record," Mr. Angus says. "Bell Canada reported that, by the end of the first week, 80% of all local calls were being dialled with 10 digits."

Alas, 10 digits is not going to be the end of the road. In the first 48 years after AT&T developed the area code numbering plan in 1947, 144 area codes were issued across North America.

In the past five years, that number has jumped to 792. "If the trend continues, all of the existing area codes could be exhausted in 10 years," said Mr. Pilley. "Then you'll have to dial even more numbers."

Area codes and the central office code (the first three numbers of a seven-digit phone number) will probably be increased four digits each, which will result in 12-digit dialling, he says. Thirteen, if it's a long-distance call.