End of an era as New York removes last public payphone

:smiling_face_with_tear:

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So sad… I will always remember a quarter to call home.

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e.t. phone home

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Will they be putting pay phones in museums I wonder?

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There is one unoperational payphone in my city that is used as a book library. People put books inside it that others can take for free.

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Good riddance. They were miserable to use. Only thing the booths were good for was sheltering from inclement weather.

(Wonder where Superman changes now?)

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remember calling collect?

my friend liked to piss off the operator. it was funny.

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there was still a pay phone in my last city. it was outside an indian store. people used it.

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I loved payphones. When i was a kid, we had a phone booth on our street. I spend a lot of time there in 70’s and 80’s to overcome boredom. In the booths were phonebooks and we,as kids, worked a way to make free phonecalls. We did lots of prankcalls.

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That’s pretty cool :smiley:

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we prank called the local airforce control tower once when i was 8.

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Our remaining payphones are now free to use for basic calls nationwide. Not that there’s many that survived but there are the odd ones around.

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These were the old mechanical ones with the old dialwheel. Something like this.


I couldn’t find an image of the payphone i mean.

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The ones here in the USA
image

I like the British version better though

image

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They used to be where we rolled joints in the winter

Oh youth

:see_no_evil:

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We had one in our high school. Then one day it was gone. I always used it freshman year when I had no cell phone yet lol

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I remember having to walk a mile to get to a pay phone when I needed help one time. I used to regularly use pay phones growing up. Then, overtime, fewer and fewer were operational. I finally got a cellphone in my early 20s

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I learned that there were actually guys who could hack the early payphones to get free calls by whistling certain sounds (kind of like the dial tone sound i guess) into the phone.

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