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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.
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.
Ahhhhh that makes sense
I saw horses in Western movies, surely they could have just driven to the gunfight?
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.
You carry payphones in your pockets nowadays
Oh my god, this is wild! You know who would like this meme? My friend, Tony
Operator, connect me to Tony, please
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
Tony who?
- The Operator
Hang on, I’m getting a page.
Why is there text on your page mine is only a callback no.
It was really just a pretty elaborate number code.
Signitures, locations, times
We should go back
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, no, these people are for sure outliers here too, I genuinely find it odd that I know someone who still uses a landline. They have cellphones but they hardly answer them.
I house-sat for them while they were out of the country and I genuinely had forgotten how much I hated a voicemail -device- that beeped at you every 2 minutes if there was a message waiting… (I was not about to answer their landline phone… I don’t know who would call them…)
And there was the brief time we said camera phone…
Honestly I never heard that one but even the term phone camera is almost obsolete.
I’ve heard it somewhere in movies or music. But it was uncommon to use because a lot of the time the camera part wasn’t relevant so you’d just call it a phone
I remember camera phones being phones that had more focus on their camera
Nah, originally just any phone with a camera, as opposed to the models of earlier years which didn’t have any.
Nokia 3310 is a legendary phone everyone knows it and it predates camera phones. Not by much, but a few years. After Nokia 3310 I had a 3330 and a 5510, both which were essentially just variations of the 3310. Then I had my first colour screen 3510i, which had a colour display (4096 colours, 96x65 pixels. That one could technically display rudimentary “photos”. There weren’t any ofc, but the images you could order by SMS were amazing compared to the earlier monochromatic displays. And even with those it was hot to order yourself some funny or racy logo made up of not too many pixels. Like these.
So because everything was so much about images and backgrounds and logos, once the first camera phones camera out, even when their cameras were horrible, it meant that you could just make a custom background for your phone just like that, even if if was a photo you couldn’t even tell what of.
So yeah people called them camera phones. Then it took years until the photos were the sort of quality you could actually put up somewhere.
But Sony did have a specific K model as well as their W (Walkman) models. One was more focused on the camera and one on music.
Rant over
It turns up in the lyrics of “When you wasn’t famous” by The Streets, released in 2006. Maybe it was somewhat regional, though, him being from England and all that.
And an iPaq which ironically wasn’t made by apple
Fun fact: When a new thing comes out and it changes the name of the old thing (landline, snail mail, Star Trek: The Original Series, etc.) the new name for the old thing is called a retronym.
That is a fun fact
edit: the list is long
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.
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.
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.
You just reminded me my house technically has a phone number, but I haven’t had a landline phone in something like 20 years. I remember WoW had just come out, was moved into a new home, and by then the home phone was never used so never got one plugged in again.
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.
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.
time to call a telephone sex hotline via the operator
I know this would be annoying as heck, but I’m laughing my ass off imagining this.
I would totally have done this too.
I used to do this at my school, and sometimes the payphones in the metro. Can confirm, I was annoying.
They’re still pretty common in Japan
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
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.
Is it rage bait or are the some of the younger ones really that stupid?
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.
I’ve never seen a gramophone or telegraph in my life but I know they’re real things
Nope. God put those in old photographs to test our faith
I have seen gramophones and telegraphs in museums, I wonder if one day I will live to see payphones in normal non specialty museums? Also right now we still have some payphones here, but what I haven’t seen in probably more than 20 years are payphone cards.
I’ve seen and heard a gramophone in person. I have owned a victrola. Never seen a telegraph in use, but I’ve talked to someone a long way off on a ham radio. I’ve owned typewriters. Payphones vanished pretty abruptly with the rise of cellular. Still incredibly smoothbrained to question their being real.
Reality itself is rage bait.
‘PC LOAD LETTER’? The fuck does that mean?!
deleted by creator
Starting with “sorry if this is a silly question” should tell you enough.
I remember trying to find quarters to call my mom to come pick me up.
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.
Is your name Bob Wehadababyitsaboy?
You’ve just unlocked a memory.
