Pay Phones
I was standing in line the other day waiting on some poor guy who was being badly embarrassed by an automatic teller machine when another guy walked up to me and asked where the nearest pay phone was located. I stood there silently for a couple of seconds trying to comprehend exactly what this guy was asking.
“A pay phone?” I asked.
“Yes. A pay phone. I need to make a call. You do have pay phones in this town?” the guy said looking at me with that boy this guy has been out in the sun too much look.
Using my wasted college education I answered, “Well, I don’t really know.”
Now frustrated, the guy stormed off muttering something about know knowing why they call it Flor-re-DUH and I began to realize that even though I’ve lived here for nearly three decades I had no idea where or if there were any pay phones in the area. After all, I hadn’t used a pay phone since my wife bought me a cell phone and spent several hours explaining that send meant call, talk meant answer and end meant hang up. I’m hoping that before I die I can figure out who or what a contact is.
When I was growing up my Dad always told me to carry an extra dime in my pocket in case I needed to call home for some reason. I always left the house with a dime in pocket which usually ended up in the candy machine rather than a pay phone. Fortunately I grew up in an area where there were few emergencies and several candy machines.
Once I entered college the price of a call was raised to a quarter which just happened to be about the price of a draft beer in the student union bar. Yes, I went to college in Wisconsin and yes they have bars on campus. Needless to say, while in college I was never faced with an emergency that couldn’t be handled by a cold beer. As a matter of fact, my college degree reads Bachelor of Arts sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon.
After being told in no uncertain words that the University was no longer interested in my continued participation, I entered the work force and began to use pay phones more and more. Back in those days there were pay phones everywhere, on every corner, in every restaurant. They even built little houses for the phones and called them phone booths.
Now, the problem with phone booths was those sliding doors. I envied Superman because he could get in and out of a phone booth like it was some sort of well rehearsed ballet. Unlike Superman I must have missed rehearsal because I always had problems with those doors. I usually could get into a phone booth without too much problem but getting out was another matter. For some reason I could not figure out how to open a phone booth door with me in the phone booth. It was sort of like getting lost in the House of Mirrors at the State Fair. No matter which way I turned my body I was always battering myself with the phone booth door and usually doing so in front of a gathering crowd.
Apparently others were having the same problem with phone booths and they were banned about the same time I realized they didn’t sell snow shovels in Florida for a reason and escaped the great white north.
Booth less pay phones sprouted up everywhere especially in convenience store parking lots. Finding a pay phone was pretty easy but using one became increasingly difficult as it never seemed to fail that every time I needed to make a call every phone in every convenience store parking lot was being used. Of course you could wait for a phone to open up but usually, if I was waiting, everyone using a phone I was waiting on was calling some government office which meant their call was put on hold and the caller was going to be standing there with the pay phone glued to their ear for the next several months.
Other challenges produced by the pay phone included pulling up to an available phone only to find the receiver wire had been cut from the body of the phone. Or, I would deposit my quarter and start dialing a number when large, noisy truck would pull up and stop only inches from the phone I was trying to use making it impossible to hear who I was calling or be heard by the person I was calling.
Remember phone books? Remember walking up to a pay phone to look up a number and make a call only to discover someone else had decided that the phone represented some form of treasure and had stolen it. Even worse, finding a pay phone with a phone book but that book had a page torn out and that page just happened to be the page with the number you needed in order to make the call.
I could go on and on but you know what? Maybe pushing send to call and talk to answer isn’t so bad after all. I think I’ll try to figure out this contacts thing.