Color Codes
Color Codes
[Cueball sits hunched over his desk, which is littered with objects. His Cueball-like friend holding his cell phone talks to him.] Friend: Hey, what's your cell number? Cueball: (Violet Brown Gray)— Uh, I mean, (718)-387-6962. Friend: Okay, you are putting down those resistors and going outside for a while. Cueball: That's probably a good idea.

Resistors are electronic components carrying color-coded bands indicating their value (measured in ohms ) and tolerance (e.g. 5%). Cueball has been hunched over his work for so long that, when asked for his phone number (by his Cueball-like friend), he absentmindedly reads out his phone's area code as a sequence of colors found on the aforementioned resistors (each colour corresponding to one of the ten decimal digits, in this case 718 – see Resistor color-coding ). He realizes his mistake after these first three digits and begins again using numbers to state the entire phone number. His friend points out that such a mistake means it's a good time to take a break, and Cueball concurs.
It's not uncommon for readers to try calling phone numbers they see inside a book or a comic strip, just to discover what it actually goes to. Randall foresees this, and in the title text he simply tells you what the phone number is.
TMBG is They Might Be Giants , an alternative rock band responsible for toe-tapping chart-topping "Birdhouse In Your Soul." At one point, they recorded individual songs on an answering machine and advertised the phone number so people could call and listen to the song on the machine. Hence, Dial-A-Song . However, the number was changed to (844)-387-6962 in 2015. TMBG has also created a website with the same function: https://dialasong.com .
Resistor color codes were mentioned again in 1604: Snakes .
[Cueball sits hunched over his desk, which is littered with objects. His Cueball-like friend holding his cell phone talks to him.] Friend: Hey, what's your cell number? Cueball: (Violet Brown Gray)— Uh, I mean, (718)-387-6962. Friend: Okay, you are putting down those resistors and going outside for a while. Cueball: That's probably a good idea.
