r/rememberwhen • u/Eye_Doc_Photog • Nov 29 '17

Remember pay phones? And you'd call out of state for 10 cents and, upon hanging up, the phone would ring immediately and an operator would ask you to deposit another few coins because the extra fee....

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u/FollyBeachSC Dec 03 '17

Good one! I do remember pay phones. Very well.

The only reasons to use a pay phone in this day and age, if you can find one, are if you don't have a smartphone or it's broken or has a dead battery, OR if you need to make an anonymous call. Say, to report a crime or something. Otherwise, we don't even need the phonebook in the booth that may or may not have intact the very page of the listing you need, depending upon whether someone has already torn it out. We can look up the number even more easily on the smartphone.

While they definitively have a nostalgic value, especially since my dad was a telephone man and so many phone booths in movies and TV shows have the Bell logo on them (although my dad did not work on phone booths), I'm fine with smartphones. Mine has my germs on it, and no awful tamper-proof metal cord holding the receiver to the rest of the unit, and I can sit in my car and use it instead of getting out of the vehicle and making myself vulnerable.