Whatever happened to …

… pay telephones?

It’s been kind of a Sheila Stewart week around here. I used her post Wednesday morning on This Week in Ontario Edublogs which meant it was added to Friday’s blog post, and I’m back with some inspiration from her for this morning. Any more and I’ll have to add her to the payroll.

A while back she sent me this story from Thunder Bay.

Tbaytel to decommission remaining public payphones

So, what has happened to them?

My first girlfriend was a long-distance call away. That’s how we measured distance then. Seaforth was a local call but Goderich was long distance. Anything on the other side of Seaforth was long distance. There didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason. There was a section in the phone book that told you where you could call locally. It wasn’t up for discussion.

I was allowed one short telephone call to her a week. Usually, it was no problem but periodically Mom and Dad would be out of the house and so my brother used it as an opportunity to sit in the kitchen and try to listen to me on the phone. Of course, that was bothersome and so I’d load up with some change and take off downtown to the one public payphone. You have to realize how important this was; I had to physically pay as opposed to the family phone where it magically went away.

Thanks to Google Streetview, it’s still there. (as of 2013)

We’re debating here whether it’s still there or not. That’s something to check out next time we make a visit.

There were a couple of payphones at the high school as well but who goes back to school in the evening? There was one at the pool hall but too many ears.

We had a discussion as I thought about this and we honestly couldn’t come up with the location of a public payphone in our town these days. Of course, most people carry smartphones and so they probably haven’t thought about going to a payphone in years. I know that I haven’t.

There always seemed to be a couple in every secondary school I could think of and I know that some administrators claimed or threatened to have them turned off when classes were in session.

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

Public payphones tried to keep up with technology; you may recall that you could make a phone call and charge it to your credit card. Even that couldn’t keep the technology reaper away though.

I guess we’ve just moved on. Thank you, technology.

For a Sunday, your thoughts…

• do you have a public telephone in your community?
• when was the last time you used a public telephone?
• do/did public payphones accept incoming calls?
• in addition to the public payphone going away, I can think of a number of jobs that would have gone away with them. Can you?
• when you walked by a public payphone, did you ever check the change return to see if someone left a quarter and you became the owner of it?
• have you ever gone to a different town and stopped to use the phonebook in a public payphone as a way to get directions?
• why do public payphones seem to be prone to damage by vandals? They seemed to be popular targets for spray paint and physical destruction. They have an interesting spin on “phone off the hook”.
• is long distance even a thing these days? I know that I can call all over North America with no extra charges on my smartphone

As always, I hope that this inspires you to leave a comment. Please do so.

This is a regular Sunday post around here.

You can read all the past posts here.