I used to work for a paging company about 600 years ago. InterLink Paging. This was back in the dark ages, when mobile phones were still the size of shoe boxes and it actually made sense to own (or lease) a “beeper”.
I constantly receive phone calls for previous owners of my numbers.
Anyway. We used to have a policy that a phone number had to be out of service for at least 6 months before we were allowed to give that number to a new customer. It made sense to me. Sure, every now and then if we were “low” on numbers - usually an order hadn’t been fulfilled by Southern Bell in time - we might assign someone a number that had only been out of commission for five months or something wacky like that.
