Technology has sent a lot of things to the annals of history, but one old-school marvel still is going strong in Jacksonville: getting the time and temperature over the telephone.
Circumstances have required changing the phone number, though.
First, a little history lesson for those of a certain age:
In the days before smartphones and personalized computer screens, finding out the exact time or whether to don a jacket meant picking up the telephone. Dialing a number connected a caller to an automated message: “It’s 1:02 p.m. The temperature is 67 degrees.”
After about five decades of being the “in” thing — it was a before-school ritual for many households — changing habits started chipping away at the number of places offering such service.
Other places, like Jacksonville, have held onto it because of use or for nostalgic reasons.
In Jacksonville, there still are plenty of people calling in.
RTI Media President Bruce Robertson said the line handles about 5,000 calls a month. His North Carolina-based company provides the technology behind Jacksonville’s time and temperature service, as well as hundreds of other cities large and small.
Altogether, RTI Media and its partners log about 1.5 million calls monthly.
“Time and temperature phone services have been around since the 1930s,” Robertson said. “Even in the age of smartphones, many people still value the simplicity and reliability of calling for the weather.”
In fact, a large number of the calls now come from cellphones, he said.
While the service is the same, one thing that had to change was the number people dial. A bank merger made the old number unavailable, so “we made the decision to keep the service available with a new number,” Robertson said.
The updated Weather Now service at 217-408-9123 is free and includes the current time, temperature, forecast and additional weather information.