A great story about a pay telephone

[persido]

Link below

https://share.newsbreak.com/16iuetcf

[MMikeJBenN27]

Hard for me to call any touch-tone "old fashioned"!

Mike

[MaximRecoil]

I've long thought that would be fun to do, especially with an actual phone booth, because phone booths have been gone for a lot longer than payphones have been. The last phone booth in my home town vanished in the early 1980s when I was about 7 years old, while the last payphone in town, which was at the grocery store, was removed only about 8 years ago.

I would never actually do it though because it would be an expensive project, including an ongoing expense of a second phone line for it, and I don't like the idea of subjecting stuff I care about to the wear and tear (and potential vandalism) of outdoor public use.

"We hooked it up to their landline. We figured out the problem was that I wasn't adding the coins first. I thought you dialed the number first—that's what I thought I remembered—and then you added the money," David explained.

That's weird. I wonder what kind of payphone it is. My payphone, which is a Western Electric single-slot with a Protel 8000 chassis, works either way. If you put in a quarter and then dial a local number, the call will go straight through. If you dial the number first, a recorded voice tells you to "Please deposit twenty-five cents," and then the call goes through. I thought that all "smart" payphones worked that way.

I remember using the "dumb" Western Electric single-slot payphone at the high school when I was a kid in the early '80s (it was long before I was in high school, but I used to participate in a Saturday morning intramural basketball program there) and I didn't like the way that thing worked at all. You had to dial the number, wait for someone to answer, and then try to put in two dimes before they hung up due to not hearing anyone on the line.

Those type of payphones did have an upside though, i.e., in cases where you were always going to be calling someone for the same reason, such as your parent for a ride home from an after-school activity, you could just call and hang up as a prearranged signal that it's time for them to come pick you up.

One thing that guy could do to make his little payphone area attract more people is add a public cell phone charging station to it. With more people having a legitimate reason to stop there, it might translate to more people using his payphone, even if only for the novelty factor. However:

"I saw him out there as he was talking on the phone, and I know you can dial 911 on that phone. I decided to go outside because I thought the odds of him having four quarters was probably pretty rare," Davis said.

A dollar to make a local call? Maybe that would be a valid inflation-adjusted price these days if the need for payphones hadn't all but vanished, but as a novelty where the goal isn't to make money, I would set it at $0.25 for local calls. And it's not even so much that spending a dollar is a big deal, but rather, people are far more likely to have $0.25 on them than a whole dollar's worth of coins (a fact that he seems to be aware of based on the above quote).

Also, since he put a bench out there, you'd think he'd also install a handset cord long enough to reach the bench.

[RDPipes]

I remember when it was a dime to make a call and there where several ways of doing so depending where you were at.
I remember one particular place where you had to dial the number first and when the party answered you put in the coins.
The only problem with this is the party answering couldn't hear you till the coins went all the way through and in that time they would hang up before you were connected and you lost your money. I don't remember how many times this happened but, I bet I lost a dollar in that phone before I got through to the party I was calling. Needless to say, I never went back to that payphone again. And yes, that was the written instructions in the booth on how to place a call.

[MaximRecoil]

I remember one particular place where you had to dial the number first and when the party answered you put in the coins.
The only problem with this is the party answering couldn't hear you till the coins went all the way through and in that time they would hang up before you were connected and you lost your money. I don't remember how many times this happened but, I bet I lost a dollar in that phone before I got through to the party I was calling. Needless to say, I never went back to that payphone again. And yes, that was the written instructions in the booth on how to place a call.

Exactly; that's the way it always was around here with the Bell System / Baby Bell operated "dumb" payphones when I was a kid in the '80s. It was even worse than your situation though, because it was 20 cents, so you had to get in 2 dimes before they hung up. I can't remember whether or not they would [reliably] give you back a nickel if you used a quarter. I do remember not wanting to take the chance of losing a nickel so I always used 2 dimes (a dime and 2 nickels, or 4 nickels, would have made matters even worse).

I never used a "smart" payphone until the early 1990s, probably because Central Maine didn't even have touch-tone service until then, and I don't know if there's even any such thing as a "smart" rotary-dial payphone.

In 1989 when I was 14, I was briefly in Nyack, NY with my family to pick up my older sister from college. While I was at the college I called my girlfriend back home in Maine from a payphone. In that case, when I dialed the number, it didn't simply go through like when dialing a local number, but rather, an operator (a real operator, not a recorded voice) came on the line and told me how much money to deposit. It was a dollar something for a minute if I remember right. Also, I went a bit over the minute but the call didn't get disconnected. Instead, when I hung up the operator immediately rang the phone. I picked up and she told me to deposit something like 35 more cents for the time that I went over. I thought it was funny because there was obviously no way for her to enforce that, especially since I was about to get into a car headed back to Maine, but I deposited the money anyway.

[RDPipes]

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this certain mishap happened in the 80's and it was 25 cents by then. Strangely enough Ma Bell owned the ones I was using for a dime in the 60's and we put the dime in first then dialed the call, easy peasy japanessey without problems.
I just don't understand nor ever did, why they had to make it so difficult in different places in the country to make a simple phone call. I mean these weren't one horse towns really.

[MaximRecoil]

Strangely enough Ma Bell owned the ones I was using for a dime in the 60's and we put the dime in first then dialed the call, easy peasy japanessey without problems.

That was well before my time, but I've seen the older 3-slot payphones being used in movies and TV shows, and they would put in a dime and then make the call. I always wondered if it actually worked that way in real life back then. They usually did it the same way with single-slot payphones in newer movies and TV shows though, and I was always skeptical of that in the '80s. I never knew that Bell had different ways of doing it in different places. Of course, with movies and TV shows they're never really making calls anyway (I always thought it was funny how payphones in movies and TV shows tend to wobble around when the actors touch them), but it's interesting that some payphones did work the way they always portray them working.

I've never even seen a 3-slot payphone in real life, let alone used one. My earliest memories are from the late 1970s, and every payphone I ever saw by that time was a single-slot rotary.

The price hike to $0.25 around here didn't happen until the late '80s or early '90s, at which point "smart" payphones (usually Western Electrics with probably a Protel 8000 chassis like mine) were common, and those were foolproof anyway.

I just don't understand nor ever did, why they had to make it so difficult in different places in the country to make a simple phone call. I mean these weren't one horse towns really.

Yeah, that's weird that they didn't all work the same way. The way they worked around here in the '80s was especially weird because of the obvious being-hung-up-on-before-you-can-speak problem with it, not to mention that it created a loophole allowing it to be used as a free signaling device like I mentioned in a previous post. Of course, you could use any payphone as a free signaling device with the help of the operator, but then you ran the risk of a big charge on your phone bill if someone answered who didn't know they weren't supposed to accept the collect call.