Tommy Tutone - 867-5309/Jenny (Official Video)

What people said

elgenie · 2022-11 · Reference

For anyone not getting the cultural reference, it's due to a 40 year old pop song that used that phone number (as one belonging to a Jenny to be called "for a good time"). [VIDEO] In the overwhelming majority of US television and movies, onscreen phone numbers are of the form 555-xxxx to prevent clashes with those telecoms actually hand out. However, numbers of the form 867-xxxx are perfectly valid; and when Brown University made the mistake of handing out 867-5309 to an unfortunate dorm room around 1999 or so, those people were deluged with phone calls asking for Jenny.

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dangerlibrary · 2022-07 · Joke / meme

The nature of the problem you are describing (private companies having a more reliable unique ID to correlate data than phone number) seems incrementally worse than what we have today. In practice, most people rarely, if ever, change their phone number. I don't like that companies demand my phone number to get cheaper groceries, but in practice I just type in "(local area code) 867-5309" [1] into whatever terminal is asking for my phone number and get the discount 100% of the time. The consequences of the problem the proposal is trying to address seem larger to me. Currently, you can be denied access to capital and even basic financial services because identity management has been outsourced to unreliable third parties with no incentive to do a better job. [1] Sorry Jenny [VIDEO]

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adrianmonk · 2020-07 · Reference

It's from the chorus of a song ("867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone): [VIDEO] On a side note, the phone system has a reserved number range (555-XXXX) for fictitious numbers for TV/movies/etc. to use. This song didn't use that but instead used a real number. When the song came out in 1981, people who had this number got so many phone calls they had to change their number. I'm not sure, but phone companies may have retired the number because it has become impractical to use. See: [LINK]

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