Cry cry cry
Cry cry cry
122 comments
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in australia they’re still everywhere because when i government sold our state telco they mandated that they maintain the pay phone network at reasonable prices
that doesn’t sound particularly comment-worthy on its own so here’s the cool part: turns out collecting coins is more expensive than the money they got from it so they just stopped charging and now all our pay phones are not only still everywhere, but entirely free and have free wifi embedded in them
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Nope that was comment worthy without the other half.
However the second part is super rad in a way only people who grew up with the word “rad” can really understand. Or whatever the Aussie equivalent of 90s slang for “cool” would be.
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My first thought was "wait it doesn'tl exist everywhere?" guess not
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I'm surprised that they didn't just embed a card reader in the phones.
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I have seen payphones around... like, at all. I've seen the iconic bright pink lit up tops and wifi symbol so I can attest that they are indeed still around, but it's very uncommon to see them. There's not a whole lot left and to say they're "everywhere", I mean... I haven't been interstate for a while but, what part of Australia are you in that these are a common fixture for you?
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in melbourne CBD is guess there’s at least 1 per corner
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Best solution that could have happened.
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Everywhere is a bit of an exaggeration they are definitely still around but nowhere nearly as prolific as they where in the 90s. Also anything that wasn't owned by Telecom/Telstra is long gone.
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Fuck me, that's actually good and I'd make good use of that
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I saw horses in Western movies, surely they could have just driven to the gunfight?
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I saw a cool movie that had guys literally riding on the backs of the horses. It was a clever spin on the worm scene from Dune, even if it wasn't a completely original idea.
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Like, without a steering wheel!?
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Somebody should describe the insane hack to these youngins where you can make a collect call to your parents from a pay phone and tell them your name is "HEY COME PICK ME UP!"
It's like you can send information to somebody across town without having coins in your pocket!
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In Australia the receiving phone would "ring" even if you didnt put any money in.
You'd dial and let it ring a few times and then hang up.
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I worked for a company back in the '00s that made most of their money off of pay phones. Even 20 years ago pay phones were obsolete so I was somewhat mystified by this during my job interview. Turns out they managed pay phones in prison - which are still a thing.
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Ahhhhh that makes sense
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Pay phones were cool. As teens, we used to go spend the summer camping with my friends in a super remote place and the only thing available connecting us with our parents was the pay phone. We'd go there twice a week to tell them we're still alive and will eventually come back home if we run out of food.
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Living the dream
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Not only were there public pay phones everywhere, but if you dialed zero, a person we called The Operator would immediately answer and you could ask them to look up a phone number for you or ask them to dial a number for you. This operator would pick up when you dialed zero from your home landline too.
Wait until you find out about all the free water fountains literally everywhere so if you were thirsty you could just stop and get an ice cold drink of water and go about your day.
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In the UK you could also sign up for a thing where you dialed 144 and then an account number and you could call anywhere without coins and it would charge it to your home phone bill. I still have that ~15-digit phone number memorized from when I was a kid lol.
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Wait until you find out about all the free water fountains literally everywhere
Go back far enough and they were even color-coded! So handy ...
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no the free water fountains still exist...
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Free water fountains still exist but good luck finding a public bathroom in walking distance of said fountain. I literally have every port a potty mesmerized in my city because no one will let you use the bathroom, even then some get locked up or completely removed 🥲
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Not where I am. They turned off the old ones--even the ones that were in parks. I see one here and there but they used to be literally everywhere. Every store had one either inside or out front. Every park had them. Every downtown area had them at every block.
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so do payphones, but most of them have been disconnected/abandoned
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Oh my god, this is wild! You know who would like this meme? My friend, Tony
Operator, connect me to Tony, please
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I lived on a farm so it was out in the middle of nowhere, and apparently our first phone number was 3
Apparently the numbersused to just be sequential
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Tony who?
- The Operator
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Now, Sarah, I reckon you know plum well which Tony, seein' as there ain't but one in all of Mayberry...
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One thing I know for sure: the term smart or mobile phone is completely obsolete for most people. The default for phone is a smartphone; if you mean something else, you need to qualify. I also heard people refer to landline phones as "something you see in old timey TV shows".
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There's a 1994 interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about how someday in the future we will have what he calls wallet PCs, and which will allow us to pay for things, be cameras, things we can use to hold our tickets to go into shows, etc. One of the best Playboy interviews.
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Sci-fi had portable ‘communicator’ devices for a long time, e.g. in ‘Star Trek’ — I see smartphones as the implementation of those. It's kinda-sorta obvious that once you have a pocket computer, you want to stuff everything you can in there too.
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I mean, he was the head of the company that wanted to be making them, of course he predicted they'd be everywhere and tiny.
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I use the number for my old landline (which has been disconnected for years now) whenever a business asks me for a number and I know they just want to spam me.
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I did this at grocery stores for decades. But now they require responding to a text code.
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I know people who currently have and use a landline.
They are old tho so that fits actually.. they had me add days of our lives to my server, and I felt a bit dirty.
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Our house still has a working landline. It's there from when my parents owned it and we didn't shut it off because it's cheap to run and for some of our older relatives it's the only way they know how to reach us. We get a lot of those "Microsoft tech support" scam calls on it, presumably because they just assume landlines are all vulnerable old people.
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In Finland it's even rarer, even old people gave up on landlines a long while ago, and nowadays only companies have them. Of course there's likely to be a few outliers, but the vast, vast majority.
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I used to give out a payphone number as my own back before i had a cell. It was close to where I hung out with friends, so there was a decent chance I would be there if you called.
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I remember in NYC, I think once my dad's phone either ran out of battery or forgot to bring it... so he used the payphones, and the conversation had to be quick because otherwise you gotta put in more quarters. I think it was just to know where to meet up or something, cuz we lived in Brooklyn and some of our relatives were in Manhattan, and so we'd just meet like every so often especially like holidays. I remember being in that Chinese Restaunt near Canal St... like often.
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Great, now I'm reminded of a project I abandoned and the pile of weird business cards I have in my junk drawer...
I set up a toll-free number a year or so back with the idea of finding (eventually) all remaining payphones in public spaces in my city, white listing the numbers and leaving a card inviting folks to call. I stopped after about a week and like 10 phones, meaning to get back to it and never did.
Did run into people legitimately using them while doing so though, which was slightly unexpected.
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Ive seen a couple in New York and several when I visted Palestine
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They're not super uncommon in Japan still. Plus they have that cool neon green paint, making them pretty hard to miss.
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Matt Damon aging meme.
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Hang on, I'm getting a page.
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Why is there text on your page mine is only a callback no.
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It was really just a pretty elaborate number code.
Signitures, locations, times
We should go back
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Oh, Kiddy...
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There's a single payphone still standing at the end of the road in the town nearest me. It was disconnected when I found it, but I got phreaky and hooked it back up + bypassed the coin mechanism. Mostly out of nostalgia, partly for the love of fixin' stuff :)
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Someone having an otherwise really bad day is going to send your soul to the Good Place
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Neato. Out of all of those I passed in my travels, the last one I could tell you the location of off the top of my head was this one, but I notice that as of this year it's also gone. If you check the latest Street View image you'll see the cables dangling from where it used to be. There ain't no hooking this one back up, alas, unless you bring your own.
Note the horse and buggy. Where we are standing is indeed out in the sticks.
I was in a random diner somewhere in Appalachia this year which had a functioning payphone and one of those old pull-knob cigarette vending machines in the back. I don't recall exactly where it was. I should have taken a picture or written it down.
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Is it rage bait or are the some of the younger ones really that stupid?
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They literally do not exist at all in many places. Why wouldnt you question their existence? Sure its easy to figure out whether they were real, but people on social media constantly ask questions without doing any research for themselves.
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Some people never grow into object permanence or conspiracy theory media beats it out of them. Moon landing? I didn’t see it happen, therefore it didn’t happen. Pay phones? Helen Keller? Spherical Earth? Vaccinations? Dinosaurs? I’ve not directly observed them, thus they must be wholly fake.
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And yet somehow God is real...
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Reality itself is rage bait.
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'PC LOAD LETTER'? The fuck does that mean?!
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Payphones have not been around/in good condition for a very long time in the uk. Hollywood has created more mundane shit before, why wouldn't they do the same for payphones?
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Don't have to be stupid to think things they never saw in real life weren't as common as they are in movies. I have a kid in high school who never saw a working public phone that I'm aware of. When I pointed out a place where one used to be mounted outside shesaid "Oh, so it is like in the movies."
Movies do often exaggerated things, so asking is reasonable if someone is young enough.
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Starting with "sorry if this is a silly question" should tell you enough.
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There was a bank of five or six payphones in the common area at my high school. Someone found out there was a number you could call which, after you hung up would immediately generate a callback to the phone it was called from. It was not uncommon to have all the phones ringing constantly.
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We had a deaf school in our high school, so one of the payphones had a keyboard and an operator would read your messages to the other party. My friend used to use it to call his friend and see how many dirty words he could get the operator to say.
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When I managed a hardware store back in the day we got scam calls fairly regularly via these types of teletext-to-operator schemes. It was always some bullshit about somebody needing 144 chainsaws or 200 lawn mowers or some shit, and they always wanted to try to pay with a check routing number, and they always wanted it delivered sight unseen to some highly suspicious location. It must have been extra infuriating for the operators, because they know damn well it's a scam but apparently they weren't allowed to interject or add to the conversation in any way to tell the recipient this. Of course we knew what was up, so I'd instruct the operator to relay to the scammer the longest and most inventive list of insults I could think of to see if I could get them to giggle. The operator, that is. Not the scammers.
I presume the scammers were connecting to the phone network via the internet, probably itself dial-up at the time.
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time to call a telephone sex hotline via the operator
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My high school only had one pay phone. It had a bad connection in the hand set, so sound cut in and out constantly. People rarely ever bothered making calls on it. The coin return also had some sort of obstruction inside it. If you inserted a quarter and then hit the coin return lever, you'd hear it fall, but it didn't actually come out. When enough quarters built up though, they would all flood out into return tray at once. Naturally, it got used as a slot machine. Drop in a quarter, pull the tiny lever, and see if you hit the jackpot.
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I know this would be annoying as heck, but I’m laughing my ass off imagining this.
I would totally have done this too.
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I used to do this at my school, and sometimes the payphones in the metro. Can confirm, I was annoying.
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I remember trying to find quarters to call my mom to come pick me up.
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We had an automated reverse charges number we'd call from the payphone. You got to say your name and the system would then call my parents at home and ask "Do you accept a reverse charge call from 'mumimatthestation'?"
Then my mum would hang up and come get me from the station.
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Where I live, not only do they still exist, but they're also free to use and occasionally also offer free wifi. Why? No idea tbh, my guess is the government contract probably required the provider to keep them working for a certain amount of time.
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If someone is legitimately asking this, they’re a fucking idiot. As a GenX there were tons of stuff that was outdated by the time I was around, but not once was there reason to believe it was made up.
I’d imagine the large majority of these “I’m so young! I don’t know what a pager is!” Is just typical “look at me!” Bullshit.
Especially considering that this dumbass has the entire world’s worth of information at their fingertips and could easily just shut up and google it if they were actually wanting to know.
Man, I do really love a lot of the internet culture, but this shit I wish never happened. The whole fake meme conversation… it’s so incredibly cringey and embarrassing.
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From what I could tell, the Bluesky OP had a private conversation with the younger fellow who simply just wanted to find out something from someone they might personally know.
It isn't wrong to ask someone a question which could be easily googleable since the question is simply a way to converse and find out more about the person you're questioning.
If they really are someone who just seeks attention, they'd just make ragebait about this topic publicly.
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Meh, scroll on and ignore it. How in the hell do you have the energy to get that excited about a stupid Internet post? Cut the kids some slack, they've never not had attention. You don't have to give them yours.
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You’re assuming I exert this energy on every single post like this. Misconception. Just finally had a moment to speak my mind on it.
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It turns out people like using the phone in their pocket more than the one used by strangers, tagged, with none of their numbers and a ripped up phone book attacked to a hard plastic case, that always makes your hands smell like metal after you dial.
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yeah, but Im over here trying to figure out how to connect an old Nortel Millennium so that the display works for caller ID.... (I want to put one of these in the garden)
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Well, and the whole 'unlimited nationwide calling for $20 a month' (at least in the states) replacing '$2 a minute with a $19.99 line fee per month' making cell phones a lot more financially feasible playing a tiny role in this, too...
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Ah man. This kind of shit makes me feel old dammit.
I had a payphone booth close to my house that I somehow got the actual number of, meaning you could call that booth. I used it to communicate secretly with my GF at the time, to keep my parents from knowing (this was before cellphones).
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as a kid i had a phone card. they were introduced the year i was born and by the time i was eight, the payphones no longer took cash.
turns out, when living out in the country there aren't that many payphones either. i could call home from school, which was a few towns over from where i lived, or from the bus terminal which was in yet another town even further away. it was a strange time, but we made it work for like seven years.
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They're still pretty common in Japan
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I wouldn't exactly say common. I really needed one when I was in Tokyo about 10 years back and had a hell of a time finding one. And in the countryside you can pretty much forget about it these days
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I guess they seem really common if you're not looking for them because they're so out of place in the 2020s, but not common at all if you actually need one.
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In my city there is only 1 payphone (that I know off) and it is literally just used as a decoration. Like red box for 1 person. It probably had it's use in the past, but now is mere decoration in city centre.
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Are you Norwegian?
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Nope
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Excellently used alongside cell phones in the high school neo-noir film Brick.
122 comments
Calling bullshit on this. I never received a telegraph, but I never assumed they were made up for the movies. This kid is either a troll or a moron.
I don’t disagree but in his defence pay phones used to be everywhere and are practically gone today vs relatively few telegraph offices.
True, but it was pretty common in old movies for someone to go down to a hotel lobby and have the clerk say, "Sir, this came for you," then hand them a message where every 3rd word was, "stop." It didn't make much sense to me, but I didn't think it was made up for the movies.