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Calling bullshit on this. I never received a telegraph, but I never assumed they were made up for the movies. This kid is either a troll or a moron.
I don’t disagree but in his defence pay phones used to be everywhere and are practically gone today vs relatively few telegraph offices.
True, but it was pretty common in old movies for someone to go down to a hotel lobby and have the clerk say, “Sir, this came for you,” then hand them a message where every 3rd word was, “stop.” It didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t think it was made up for the movies.
Also, kids today still know what a phone is and what its used for. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that phone boxes aren’t needed anymore now that everyone has a phone in their pocket.
You have a call from “mom come get me” would you like to accept the charges?
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
That’s amazing to me. So far apart but so lame together 🫶🏻
Bonza mate sounds pretty awesome by comparison, but maybe because I wasn’t bathed in it throughout my life…?
Nah, it’s awesome anyway.
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)
Ironically, for homeless people a smartphone is a great investment, since the web allows finding support services and such stuff. But free wifi from the booths is probably great. Idk where they’re charging the phones, though — perhaps at sympathetic businesses.
absolutely correct! i used to work for a not for profit that built a big service search engine (largely used for crisis helplines, medical referrals etc) and released a phone app specifically for help finding homeless support services
there are power points in maccas, food courts, libraries, and even randomly dotted around cities outside for maintenance
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.
I used to have a note in my wallet, but maintaining it was unwieldy and I eventually gave it up.
Probably a bad idea but nowadays I rely on my phones emergency calling. I have my contacts set up and my phone and watch are supposed to call if I get hit by a car. I think there’s a way for calling my emergency contacts even when my phone is locked but I don’t know if anyone knows how to do that.
I’m not sure emergency contacts are actually helpful anymore though. I still have family but they’re scattered. You can call my Mom but it’s a 14 hour drive that she’s too old to make do what’s the point. My ex is local but she’s my ex. My kids should know if I die but I don’t see how they’d help
I have no important people or anyone who would care about me, so needless for me, but a fair idea for those who do.
I don’t even have an emergency contact anymore.
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’m surprised that they didn’t just embed a card reader in the phones.
Still not really feasible. The card charges on a $0.20 call would be “unreasonable”.
Depends on how you define unreasonable….
We still have some really cheap parking meters. For example to keep people from using the library parking lot all day, there is a meter and 2 hour limit. It’s only a quarter for half an hour or maybe even an hour.
But who carries quarters anymore? There’s an app for that. You can pay by app. Each quarter has a quarter surcharge. I think that’s unreasonable and refuse but a lot of people are ok with it. I say “100% fee is unreasonable” but they say “25¢ fee is cheap and convenient ”.
Anyone would consider a 20c fee on a 20c charge to be unreasonable.
Visa executives find it perfectly reasonable, apparently.
Where I am, a few payphones exist here and there, and they use specialized cards that are (iirc) tied to the person. This was probably done just so the police can spy on who makes calls.
My first thought was “wait it doesn’tl exist everywhere?” guess not
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.
I have seen payphones around… like, at all. I’ve seen the iconic bright pink lit up tops and wifi symbol so I can attest that they are indeed still around, but it’s very uncommon to see them. There’s not a whole lot left and to say they’re “everywhere”, I mean… I haven’t been interstate for a while but, what part of Australia are you in that these are a common fixture for you?
in melbourne CBD is guess there’s at least 1 per corner
Best solution that could have happened.
Fuck me, that’s actually good and I’d make good use of that
I saw horses in Western movies, surely they could have just driven to the gunfight?
I saw a cool movie that had guys literally riding on the backs of the horses. It was a clever spin on the worm scene from Dune, even if it wasn’t a completely original idea.
Like, without a steering wheel!?
I worked for a company back in the '00s that made most of their money off of pay phones. Even 20 years ago pay phones were obsolete so I was somewhat mystified by this during my job interview. Turns out they managed pay phones in prison - which are still a thing.
Ahhhhh that makes sense
Somebody should describe the insane hack to these youngins where you can make a collect call to your parents from a pay phone and tell them your name is “HEY COME PICK ME UP!”
It’s like you can send information to somebody across town without having coins in your pocket!
The real phone “hacks” were called phreaking back in the day.
In Australia the receiving phone would “ring” even if you didnt put any money in.
You’d dial and let it ring a few times and then hang up.
Pay phones were cool. As teens, we used to go spend the summer camping with my friends in a super remote place and the only thing available connecting us with our parents was the pay phone. We’d go there twice a week to tell them we’re still alive and will eventually come back home if we run out of food.
Living the dream
Oh my god, this is wild! You know who would like this meme? My friend, Tony
Operator, connect me to Tony, please
I lived on a farm so it was out in the middle of nowhere, and apparently our first phone number was 3
Apparently the numbersused to just be sequential
Tony who?
- The Operator
Now, Sarah, I reckon you know plum well which Tony, seein’ as there ain’t but one in all of Mayberry…
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.
In the UK you could also sign up for a thing where you dialed 144 and then an account number and you could call anywhere without coins and it would charge it to your home phone bill. I still have that ~15-digit phone number memorized from when I was a kid lol.
Wait until you find out about all the free water fountains literally everywhere
Go back far enough and they were even color-coded! So handy …
no the free water fountains still exist…
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 🥲
How do you mesmerize a port a potty? I’m almost afraid to ask, but here I am lol
You look deep into it’s soul… “porta-potty, I’m going to count back from ten to one, when I reach one, you will be a coffee shop… ten, nine…”
How do you mesmerize a port a potty?
There’s a mobile game in there somewhere…
Well I pass one on my bike and make a mental note. I live in smallish city so for me its essential to know. I have peed in alleyways and bushes off the trails but I much prefer the privacy of the port a potty, or an actual bathroom. There use to be some by the hotels and recently renovated buildings, also in some parks. I been out of commission cause I broke my collarbone, biking, so I don’t know a lot of the recent spots admittedly
I love the public washrooms in parks that are closed ‘after hours’, despite the park facilities being rented out for adult sports outside of those hours
they’re really streamlining that sex offender pipeline by telling adults to piss in the woods next to a park, often near a school
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.
so do payphones, but most of them have been disconnected/abandoned
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.
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”.
And there was the brief time we said camera phone…
Honestly I never heard that one but even the term phone camera is almost obsolete.
I’ve heard it somewhere in movies or music. But it was uncommon to use because a lot of the time the camera part wasn’t relevant so you’d just call it a phone
I remember camera phones being phones that had more focus on their camera
Nah, originally just any phone with a camera, as opposed to the models of earlier years which didn’t have any.
Nokia 3310 is a legendary phone everyone knows it and it predates camera phones. Not by much, but a few years. After Nokia 3310 I had a 3330 and a 5510, both which were essentially just variations of the 3310. Then I had my first colour screen 3510i, which had a colour display (4096 colours, 96x65 pixels. That one could technically display rudimentary “photos”. There weren’t any ofc, but the images you could order by SMS were amazing compared to the earlier monochromatic displays. And even with those it was hot to order yourself some funny or racy logo made up of not too many pixels. Like these.
So because everything was so much about images and backgrounds and logos, once the first camera phones camera out, even when their cameras were horrible, it meant that you could just make a custom background for your phone just like that, even if if was a photo you couldn’t even tell what of.
So yeah people called them camera phones. Then it took years until the photos were the sort of quality you could actually put up somewhere.
But Sony did have a specific K model as well as their W (Walkman) models. One was more focused on the camera and one on music.
Rant over
What the hell are those ‘s’es in ‘uusimmat’ and ‘suosituimmat’? Is it ‘ß’? Why is it there?
Huh. Seems like a version of cursive s, but am not sure.
It turns up in the lyrics of “When you wasn’t famous” by The Streets, released in 2006. Maybe it was somewhat regional, though, him being from England and all that.
And an iPaq which ironically wasn’t made by apple
Fun fact: When a new thing comes out and it changes the name of the old thing (landline, snail mail, Star Trek: The Original Series, etc.) the new name for the old thing is called a retronym.
That is a fun fact
edit: the list is long
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.
Sci-fi had portable ‘communicator’ devices for a long time, e.g. in ‘Star Trek’ — I see smartphones as the implementation of those. It’s kinda-sorta obvious that once you have a pocket computer, you want to stuff everything you can in there too.
I mean, he was the head of the company that wanted to be making them, of course he predicted they’d be everywhere and tiny.
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.
I did this at grocery stores for decades. But now they require responding to a text code.
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.
Our house still has a working landline. It’s there from when my parents owned it and we didn’t shut it off because it’s cheap to run and for some of our older relatives it’s the only way they know how to reach us. We get a lot of those “Microsoft tech support” scam calls on it, presumably because they just assume landlines are all vulnerable old people.
In Finland it’s even rarer, even old people gave up on landlines a long while ago, and nowadays only companies have them. Of course there’s likely to be a few outliers, but the vast, vast majority.
Oh, no, these people are for sure outliers here too, I genuinely find it odd that I know someone who still uses a landline. They have cellphones but they hardly answer them.
I house-sat for them while they were out of the country and I genuinely had forgotten how much I hated a voicemail -device- that beeped at you every 2 minutes if there was a message waiting… (I was not about to answer their landline phone… I don’t know who would call them…)
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.
I remember in NYC, I think once my dad’s phone either ran out of battery or forgot to bring it… so he used the payphones, and the conversation had to be quick because otherwise you gotta put in more quarters. I think it was just to know where to meet up or something, cuz we lived in Brooklyn and some of our relatives were in Manhattan, and so we’d just meet like every so often especially like holidays. I remember being in that Chinese Restaunt near Canal St… like often.
Great, now I’m reminded of a project I abandoned and the pile of weird business cards I have in my junk drawer…
I set up a toll-free number a year or so back with the idea of finding (eventually) all remaining payphones in public spaces in my city, white listing the numbers and leaving a card inviting folks to call. I stopped after about a week and like 10 phones, meaning to get back to it and never did.
Did run into people legitimately using them while doing so though, which was slightly unexpected.
Ive seen a couple in New York and several when I visted Palestine
They’re not super uncommon in Japan still. Plus they have that cool neon green paint, making them pretty hard to miss.
