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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
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.
Best solution that could have happened.
I’d be shit out of luck using a payphone in today’s world.
I don’t remember anyone’s phonenumbers except my teenage girlfriend’s family, because while she has changed her phone number, the mother and brother were just 1 number off so I remember them, especially because the first 7 numbers are same as mine.
But aside from that, idk, maybe my own mother and brother.
But I haven’t learned a phone number in fucking decades.
Pretty cool though as you know they’re there, so either you can use the WiFi with your own device or just remember a few numbers in case you run out of charge.
yeah - i mostly see them as a public good for low income or homeless people… it allows them a lot of different places they can place free phone calls… perhaps not ideally as private as you’d like to deal with medical or social security things, but services exist for that too - just pay phones are everywhere
also i guess for calling 000 (our 911)
The only number I can remember of hand is my own childhood house line. Like I literally just had to look up my own mobile number!
They’re still pretty common in Japan
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.
no the free water fountains still exist…
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.
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 🥲
I love the public washrooms in parks that are closed ‘after hours’, despite the park facilities being rented out for adult sports outside of those hours
they’re really streamlining that sex offender pipeline by telling adults to piss in the woods next to a park, often near a school
How do you mesmerize a port a potty? I’m almost afraid to ask, but here I am lol
Well I pass one on my bike and make a mental note. I live in smallish city so for me its essential to know. I have peed in alleyways and bushes off the trails but I much prefer the privacy of the port a potty, or an actual bathroom. There use to be some by the hotels and recently renovated buildings, also in some parks. I been out of commission cause I broke my collarbone, biking, so I don’t know a lot of the recent spots admittedly
so do payphones, but most of them have been disconnected/abandoned
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 :)
Someone having an otherwise really bad day is going to send your soul to the Good Place
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Excellently used alongside cell phones in the high school neo-noir film Brick.
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.
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.
Yeah, like in Italy i never saw one
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?
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.
And yet somehow God is real…
Reality itself is rage bait.
‘PC LOAD LETTER’? The fuck does that mean?!
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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.
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.
Yep! A friend would occasionally walk to the nearest payphone, initiate a collect call, and when it asked for a name he would state the payphone number (we didn’t have caller id). He’d hang up and I could call the payphone and we would make our plans.
Is your name Bob Wehadababyitsaboy?
You’ve just unlocked a memory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
You’ve got a payphone you’re trying to setup? That’s awesome! I’ve always wanted something like that, but I would have to be able to make it actually work.
Currently I got hold of an old 1950’s wall-mounted rotary phone and it’s hooked to a Bluetooth adapter that makes it work via my cell phone.
Havn’t bought one yet. Just eyeing my next project (realistically 2 projects from now). I narrowed down the Millennium cause I think I could get the most utility out of it. If I were to really do it how I would like Id need a pbx and thats a project Im definitely not willing to take on for some time.
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…
