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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I know people who currently have and use a landline.
They are old tho so that fits actually.. they had me add days of our lives to my server, and I felt a bit dirty.
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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.
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no the free water fountains still exist...
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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 🥲
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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.
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so do payphones, but most of them have been disconnected/abandoned
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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.
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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.
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time to call a telephone sex hotline via the operator
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I know this would be annoying as heck, but I’m laughing my ass off imagining this.
I would totally have done this too.
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I used to do this at my school, and sometimes the payphones in the metro. Can confirm, I was annoying.
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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.
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I used to give out a payphone number as my own back before i had a cell. It was close to where I hung out with friends, so there was a decent chance I would be there if you called.
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Is it rage bait or are the some of the younger ones really that stupid?
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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.
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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.
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And yet somehow God is real...
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Reality itself is rage bait.
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'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.
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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?
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Starting with "sorry if this is a silly question" should tell you enough.
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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 :)
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Someone having an otherwise really bad day is going to send your soul to the Good Place
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I remember trying to find quarters to call my mom to come pick me up.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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...
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Oh my god, this is wild! You know who would like this meme? My friend, Tony
Operator, connect me to Tony, please
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Tony who?
- The Operator
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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.
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In my city there is only 1 payphone (that I know off) and it is literally just used as a decoration. Like red box for 1 person. It probably had it's use in the past, but now is mere decoration in city centre.
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Are you Norwegian?
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Nope
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They're still pretty common in Japan
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I wouldn't exactly say common. I really needed one when I was in Tokyo about 10 years back and had a hell of a time finding one. And in the countryside you can pretty much forget about it these days
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I guess they seem really common if you're not looking for them because they're so out of place in the 2020s, but not common at all if you actually need one.
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Hang on, I'm getting a page.
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Why is there text on your page mine is only a callback no.
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Excellently used alongside cell phones in the high school neo-noir film Brick.
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
Nope that was comment worthy without the other half.
However the second part is super rad in a way only people who grew up with the word “rad” can really understand. Or whatever the Aussie equivalent of 90s slang for “cool” would be.
rad works :p you could go with BONZA MATE if you’re really putting it on ahah
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!
I have the most important numbers stored in a note on my smartwatch (and my bike's head unit) so I can still call people in an emergency even if my phone is dead. I should probably put them on a note in my wallet too.
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.
Fuck me, that's actually good and I'd make good use of that