This former wall of payphones at Twin City supermarket is looking pretty barren.A couple of months ago, Verizon took out the payphone in Parking Lot 7, along with all its wires and the metal stanchion it had been mounted on. That phone was often vandalized and repair was quite costly.
The vanishing payphones reminded me of a feature in 2600 magazine, photos of payphones around the world. Click here for a link. Probably a lot of them are gone as well, now that people even in developing countries use cell phones for talking and even for monetary transactions, as is being done now in Haiti. There is a system that makes a phone a virtual debit card, according to a radio program I heard last week.
Years ago, when Faheemah El-Amin was on the City Council, payphones in Plainfield had become such a nuisance that the city proposed a phone ordinance (I forget whether it was enacted). Payphones had become the outdoor offices of some drug dealers, who stood at them for long hours and littered the vicinity with snack bags and such. There was also a flurry of protest over private payphones, which could be purchased by a property owner who then collected the coins. As I recall, they also attracted loiterers and and litterers.
Payphones were also a target of hackers, who figured out how to activate them for free to make long-distance calls (another flash from the past). Some users could whistle the tones needed to activate the phones. Click here to see an interesting history of the "Blue Box" era of hacking.
The payphone's wire pole in Lot 7 crashed on a truck parked in the lot after the base of the pole rusted through. I will not miss that payphone, which was the source of many a shouted one-way early morning phone call by lovelorn or angry callers, who accompanied their rantings with gestures and copious curse words. I was awakened many times each summer by these monologues at 2 or 3 a.m.
It's kind of funny now that cell phones have become a nuisance to those who are forced to listen to half a conversation on the train, bus or street. Maybe someday there will be implants that make people virtually telepathic and then they can babble back and forth in their heads without bothering others.
--Bernice
Telephonic instead of telepathic?
ReplyDeleteThere was an ordinance covering the installation of payphones and there was a permit application fee involved as well as an inspection approval process and had to be signed off by the Director of Public Affairs & Safety. The payphones also had to be resticted to outgoing calls only and there was a block for incoming calls. The City also had a contract with Verizon for 16 payphones and received commissions on them which slowly dwindled to a small amount as cell phone usage increased.
ReplyDeleteOne solar flare or an asteroid strike or even a small nucler warhead exploded at the right height any of which could cause an EMP, possibly large enough to send us back to the 19th century. Or how about the Chinese with their new toys knocking out a few of our sattelites. All that we depend on and take for granted, could be gone in a heartbeat!
ReplyDelete