Last pay phone in downtown DC to be removed

[Tanuki]

https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/10/28/an-ode-to-the-final-pay-phone-in-downtown-dc/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=an-ode-to-the-final-pay-phone-in-downtown-dc

"The last pay phone in downtown DC sits in an assuming box fixed to a squat pole on the sidewalk in front of the new Cheesecake Factory on H Street, Northwest. If you’ve ever walked by, you probably didn’t register it. You almost certainly didn’t try to make a call. Or at least if you did, David Ferguson, general manager of that Cheesecake Factory outpost, hasn’t noticed it. He’s never spotted anyone pressing the receiver to their ear. “I would remember that if I had,” he says. Ferguson often cleans up trash left on the box, but he’s never lifted the handset, either. “That may be one of the dirtiest things in DC,” he says, “so I’ve never put it up to my face or ears. I was never brave enough to try it.”

Actually, the thing doesn’t work, and apparently hasn’t since last year. Now it’s going to be removed, according to the city’s Public Service Commission, which oversees telecommunications and energy utilities. That’s no huge surprise. But for anyone who can recall exactly how that hard plastic receiver felt against your ear, it’s still a bit sad—a minor sign of how DC’s past is always fading into the distance. Your childhood toy store goes out of business. A favorite high-school teacher retires. The fancy building you vividly remember being all glossy and new is currently so out of date, it’s being razed and replaced. Just another gut-punch reminder of your own impending obsolescence.

It wasn’t long ago that pay phones were ubiquitous. They’ve been around since the 19th century, and as recently as 1999 there were 2 million of them around the country. But by 2018, that number had plunged to about 100,000, and today they seem about as modern as TVs with UHF dials—more Dupont than 202 (or, God help us, 771). There were 127 outdoor public phones in the District a decade ago, the Public Service Commission says. Today, there are just six: the one on H Street plus four along a stretch of Mount Pleasant Street and one in Adams Morgan, outside the bar Shenanigans. (Should you ever lose your iPhone after a night of hard drinking, here’s the establishment to be in.)"...(more)

[PoliticAverse]

1. No....

[James48]

7. I love that open!

Watched it as a seven year old kid. Absolutely the funniest show.

I didn’t know Mel Brooks and Buck Henry were credited with creating Get Smart!. Amazing minds.

[lpbk2713]

2. I saw one in my local hospital yesterday. Thought it was strange just seeing one

It said it took twenty-five cents. It seemed to me it should have been more.
It was the same price I last took notice of one about twenty years ago.

[Rorey]

3. I saw one outside of a convenience store a couple of days ago

It was weird.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. So few pay phones.

More than a decade ago, the local paper where I live did a story on the remaining pay phones in this city. By the time the story was printed, the pay phones they talked about were mostly gone.

At the time I was an information clerk at the local hospital. There were several pay phones near my desk. They then went away. I tried very hard to remember to bring my cell phone to work, alas not always successfully, so that if someone needed to make a call, I could hand them my phone and say go ahead. I always had far more minutes than I could possibly use up. It was gratifying to be able to hand my phone to someone and tell them to make the call they needed. The only hang up was that I'd moved there from another state, and so the area code for my cell phone wasn't local. I'd always tell them, when they needed to leave a message, to say that this was a borrowed cell phone, and to please call right back. Most of the time that worked.

When I was an operator for Ma Bell back in the 1960's, among the things I learned was how pay phones were designated. They were, at that time invariably XXX - 9XXX. That 9 is crucial, because it told us if a phone was a pay phone or not. So someone making a collect call to a particular phone, we needed to know if it was a pay phone or not. Ahh, the esoteric things one learns in various jobs.

[dweller]

5. And at one time, as far as I know this is true

There were people who could whistle tones into a pay phone and could connect to any phone, anyplace in the world …
I always thought that was really cool


✌🏻

[Tanuki]

6. Blue box, Captain Crunch, Wozniak and Jobs...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

"A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. This allowed the user, referred to as a "phreaker", to surreptitiously place long-distance calls that would be billed to another number or dismissed entirely as an incomplete call. A number of similar "color boxes" were also created to control other aspects of the phone network.

First developed in the 1960s and used by a small phreaker community, the introduction of low-cost microelectronics in the early 1970s greatly simplified these devices to the point where they could be constructed by anyone reasonably competent with a soldering iron or breadboard construction. Soon after, models of relatively low quality were being offered fully assembled, but these generally required tinkering on the part of the user to keep operational. An exception was the model designed Steve Wozniak, a robust system that was sold by Steve Jobs prior to starting work on the Apple I.
....
Among the earliest to discover this effect was Joe Engressia, known as Joybubbles, who accidentally discovered it at the age of seven by whistling. He became fascinated with the phone network, and over the next decade had built up a considerable base of knowledge about the system and how to place calls using the control tones[7] He and other famous phone phreaks, such as "Bill from New York" and "The Glitch", trained themselves to whistle 2600 Hz to reset a trunk line. They also learned how to route telephone calls by causing trunks to flash in certain patterns[clarification needed].

At one point in the 1960s, packages of the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal included a free gift: a small whistle that, by coincidence, generated a 2600 Hz tone when one of the whistle's two holes was covered.[8] The phreaker John Draper adopted his nickname "Captain Crunch" from this whistle.[9]...(more)

[marybourg]

8. UNassuming box, maybe?

[

[Submariner]

9. Pay phone booths out of sight of cameras are one of the last places

I feel safe to call my fascist repub senators and reps and unload on their treasonous asses without getting targeted by the Rubio/Scott gestapo.

We need more phone booths, not less, in this day and age of pre-civil war.