Did You Know Denver Still Has a Time and Temperature Hotline and It Gets a Ton of Calls?
Apr 11, 2023, 3:22 PM
Photo by Camerique/Getty Images
This might blow your mind if you’re under 30 or so: Calling a hotline to find out the TIME and TEMPERATURE use to be a thing people did. But this part was news to me: It’s actually STILL something a lot of people do. Various hotlines around the U.S., including Denver, continue to get over a million calls a month combined.
Most of us check the time and temp by just LOOKING at our phone now, so it’s more of a novelty thing. It used to be info we actually NEEDED and couldn’t easily get.
Hotlines have been popping back up in lots of cities, because die-hard fans are relaunching them and paying to keep them active.
One guy named John Lochridge brought a hotline in Dallas after it shut down in 2011. Now he owns HUNDREDS of time-and-temp lines in other cities too, including New York, Chicago . . . and Denver!
If you’re a Denver-area old-timer, you might remember dialing 303-844-4444 to hear the phone company’s time-and-temp line (though you probably didn’t dial the area code back then).
Now you’ll probably also hear an ad before you get the good stuff, because the Denver line gets around a thousand calls a month, so it could be a good investment for certain advertisers.
