Whenever I pass a payphone – which is not very often here in Boston (the only ones I can think of are some bright yellow ones in front of the firehouse on Cambridge Street) – I ask myself two questions: Who still uses a payphone? How long are these suckers going to be around?
Since I’m married to the only person in the USA over the age of 9 and under the age of 90 who doesn’t own a cellphone or smartphone, I do have a partial answer to that first question. But unless my husband has to make a call while passing by the firehouse on Cambridge Street, he’ll be out of luck. Still, he always makes sure to have a quarter on him when he leaves the house.
As for how much longer they’re going to be around, that’s anyone’s guess. With throwaway phones, drug dealers and other criminals no longer use them. So who does?
There’s now a partial answer to that question, too: those living in the Manhattan flood zone.
Natural disasters tend to vindicate the public pay phone. With their clunky bodies mounted high and sometimes behind glass stalls, they generally remain serviceable during power outages, even amid flooding. When times get tough, in fact, the biggest challenge is often keeping the devices free of coin overloads. (Source: WSJ Online.)
Ah, the payphone.
When I was in college, students didn’t have phones in their rooms (let alone a cellphone; our only mobile devices were our feet). There were a couple of payphones on each floor of the dorm, and we used those. The phones were “manned” (or, in our case “wommaned”) for a few hours in the evening, when the freshmen in the hall had to take turns answering, and running down the upperclassmen to alert them to a call. Failing to find them, you would take a message. People would sometimes post their whereabouts on their dorm door “Kitchen,” “Library,” “Smoker.” And if they were in the smoker– a bleak room in the dorm basement where students could, well, smoke – you would call down there to inform them that they had a call. (The smokers were also where students played bridge. I maintain that the reason I never learned to play bridge was that I didn’t smoke.)
One time when I called down to the smoker, the line was busy, so I left the girl (as we were then known) a note on her door, letting her know who had called, etc. Well, a couple of hours later, wasn’t Mary B. – a senior – pounding on my door, bat out of hell, screaming at me because I hadn’t trekked down the five flights of stairs to get her and tell her she had an ultra-important call.
Anyway, the payphones were how we called home, communicated with friends, heard from boys (as they were then known) and, in general, conducted our off-campus lives.
I remember when one of the payphones in our dorm was broken, and could be used to make “free” long-distance calls.
Word spread quickly throughout our small campus, and pretty soon there was a perpetual line outside the lucky payphone.
Alas, someone dimed the phone, and the long distance callers were out of luck.
In those days, if you were out and about and had to call someone, you made sure that you had a dime with you. If you didn’t know the number, most payphones had a phonebook chained to them. Or you could call information. For free.
Of course, back in the day, most of the important numbers were memorized. And once you memorized a number, by golly, it stuck with you. Although she’s been dead nearly 17 years, I still remember my aunt’s: 244-6532. I could probably dredge up the numbers of my friends from high school, if I had to.
Now, of course, the only numbers I know are those that friends and family had before the adoption of the cell phone. Thus, I readily remember my sister Trish’s home phone number, because she’s had it for nearly twenty years. But my sister Kath’s – given that she moved from one exchange to the next – I have to struggle with – lots of 7’s and 1’s. That’s because she acquired that number after I had a cellphone (and speed-dial on my home phone).
In any case, payphones have been heavily relied upon since Sandy, which knocked or flooded out power and cell phone towers, and, in general, was no kinder to communications than it was to roller coasters, beachfront cottages, and subway lines.
Some folks of a certain age, however, when confronted with such retro “technology”, can’t quite figure out the plot. One young (24 years old) woman interviewed for the WSJ article admitted that she “lost a lot of coins” before grocking to the payphone way of life.
I’m a bit sympathetic here.
The first time I went to Europe, where as I buzzed in and out of twenty different coutries - I was frequently calling ahead to hostels. I remember the challenge of figuring out payphone systems that were unique to each country. You dialed, then put the coin in. You put the coin in, then pressed the unmarked button, then dialed. You didn’t put a coin in: you had to get a special jetton somewhere and use that.
And this was before every major European city put English language instructions on everything.
I used to know how to pantomime ‘how does this work’ in a lot of different languages.
Although I haven’t used a payphone in years, I’m quite sure that my muscle memory would hop to, and I’d remember how to drop the coin, wait for the dial tone, and punch in the number.
New Yorkers are, of course, a savvy bunch, and they’ve figured the low-tech out payphone just find. Such that:
"Phones that normally do two dollars a day are taking in $50 a day," says Peter Izzo of Van Wagner Communications, one of 13 local pay-phone-operating franchises. "In times of distress, the people of the city love them."
At two dollars a day, I don’t imagine that payphones have much of a future. Even at $50 a day, they’d have to be pretty much maintenance free to bother investing in.
So the payphone’s one more thing to wax nostalgic about.
No, not about the dirty, smelly payphones that were in booths – the ones with the partial dangling phonebook, with shredded pages paper-mache’d to the floor with urine instead of water – but about the slower pace of the world where no one felt the need to be always on. It really was a lot easier in so many, many ways.
Meanwhile, the thought of young folks struggling to learn the mechanics of a pay phone reminded me of my niece Molly’s puzzlement at our Yankee Swap last Christmas.
My brother-in-law had brought his mother’s old Bakelite rotary dial phone as his swap “gift”. When Molly got it, she looked at the dial face, saw the letters, and asked, “Is this how you used to text?”
A reasonable enough question, but LOL to that.
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