I kid you not but there was once a listing in New England Telephone's white pages for a Bippin P. Dikshit.
That could not be a real name. But then, I've run across several odd ones in my day so maybe it was.
And friends had the license plates I-812 and OU-812 (I ate one too, and Oh you ate one too). That lasted for about a year until the DMV got wind of what they were talking about.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And you have probably heard of business places which want to be listed _first_ in the directory, so they call their business 'A' in order to be first. The difficult with being 'A' is there are so many who wish that designation, so telco's rules seem to be that when two or more last names amd surnames are identical, all the way down to the middle initial, then further sorting is done by the _street_ name, so that 'John J. Smith' of 1234 Any Street is listed prior to 'John J. Smith' of 1234 Somewhere Street, because A's come ahead of S's. Now if there are two or more John J. Smith's both living on Any Street, then the sort continues by _street number_ on 'Any' street, so that the party at 1234 Any Street is listed ahead of the party at 2345 Any Street. If a business listing has initials with mean anything the sort is done by what the intial 'means' in real life. So for example 'FBI' would be listed mid the 'Federal' (as the first word) listings, where a radio station (KIND or KOSU for example) would be listed at the first of the listings since 'K' by itself has no generally understood meaning. Companies with numerals as part of their name, i.e. '800 Service Corporation' generally go wherever the number spelled out would go. i.e.'Eight Hundred Service Corporation'There very seldom is any rush to be the _last_ listing in the phone book. However, to assure that remains the case, in Chicago for many years, the final entry in the alphabetical phone book belonged to a 'Mr. Ziggy Zzyxxzy' on Zeigfeld Street. If you do ask to be listed _first_ in the book, Illinois Bell looks sort of askance at that, and demands to see your paperwork from the state. For quite a few years, literally the first listing was always 'A' (with several other A's following him),but he came first since he was at 1 West Adams Street. I think the one line description of the business said it was a telephone answering service, but if you cross-checked via the number (the old '2080' method), it was listed as Rogers Telephone Answering Service, which was a few blocks away from '1 West Adams Street', rather than as 'A'. PAT]