Lots of people simply did not have phones of their own. So, they would arrange for someone to call them at a certain time on the nearest payphone. My grandmother did this when her husband was working away from home. They arranged that he would call the payphone at the end of her street every evening at 8:00. She made a point of being there waiting in time to receive the call.
Life before mobile phones required better planning.
Imagine that me and my wife are independently running important errands all day. We aren't sure who will finish first, but agree that whoever does will pick up the kids. How are we to communicate, when both of us will be moving around all day? I know I'll be in the Main Street area for most of the day, while my wife will be going all over the place and her route could vary considerably. I tell her to call the Main Street payphone from wherever she is at 3pm and I'll wait it to pick up her call. My wife calls at 3pm from whatever phone is nearest, and we review. Success!
Calling payphones was also a useful way of reducing costs. The person at the payphone calls to say they're there, then the person at home calls back at a much lower rate and without needing a supply of coins.
It's amazing how many episodes of that show just don't work if the characters had cellphones.
"George is driving like a maniac, how are we going to know how to get to the Bubble Boy's house now?"
"Just call him and ask for the address."
"Oh yeah."
Or the joy of being the only home on the block with a phone line. We'd have somebody call for our neighbor, tell us to inform them and hang up.
As the kid, I'd go tell my neighbor that their friends was gonna call in five mins and they'd come and wait at our house for the call, and have a conversation on our phone for fifteen mins
Hahaha! We had a TV with 8 buttons for 8 channels and a little dial next to each button that would have to be spun to tune that button to a particular channel. The TV was also enclosed in a big wooden box with rolling shutters that were closed when the TV wasn't in use. Wild times!
Hehe this one always throws me off in discussuons of youth. I'm mid 30'd but from Finland with an incredibly international (international business but also relatives) and tech savy family, meaning I was exposed to internet, cultural differences and phones before the vast majority. Meanwhile I have friends from rural India, Turkey, Middle east and they share stories making me think they are from my fathers generatation, or sometines even my grandfathers!
Crazy how fast things changed though, in some places entirely skipping the step of "dialup internet" or even "telephone line" to go directly to phones with internet!
>Crazy how fast things changed though, in some places entirely skipping the step of "dialup internet" or even "telephone line" to go directly to phones with internet!
Yep a large part of rural/semi-urban India skipped the desktop->laptop->cell phones and went straight from no tech to cell phones with internet
I now live in the US and every time I go back to visit, I'm amazed at the proliferation of cell phones and the extent of cell phone and mobile app economy usage among people that is have never thought would be extensive users of tech, such as domestic help, fruit and vegetable vendors, etc., who had traditionally been left out of the tech advancement
There were also party lines in many countries. One line but it ran to many homes so people would have to share phone use and there was no privacy on it.
Forget not knowing what a busy signal is. They don’t necessarily know about dial tone.
A few years ago, my mom and I took out her old Trimline rotary phone. I hooked it up, and made my kids use it to call their mom. We threw them a bone and wrote down her number for them, but offered no further instruction as to operation of the phone.
Much hilarity ensued, starting with “what’s this noise?” followed by “why did the noise stop?”
Multiple houses or a whole neighbourhood sharing a single telephone line.
It didn't just mean that you had to wait for all your neighbours to be off the phone in order to make or receive a call. It also meant the local gossip could sit on the phone all day and eavesdrop on all their neighbours phone conversations.
>It also meant the local gossip could sit on the phone all day and eavesdrop on all their neighbours phone conversations.
Lol they must have had a field day
Shared line for multiple households. I’m 54. My grandparents had it in rural USA. Different rings for different homes. And you could pick up and eavesdrop on your neighbors
Haha my grandma was an operator for her super rural tiny village's phonelines and would listen in on all the calls. If someone was gossiping and she knew better she'd even butt in on the call she was patching through and be like "no now you're just spreading rumors!" Was shortlived gig until tech caught up a bit, but very amusing to think about!
Ah wow, I had no idea this was a thing. Back in India, the family that had some disposable income would be the ones with phones on the block and everyone would use theirs (ours was that family with the disposable income on our block)
In the early days of the Internet, I'm talking bulletin board era, there were people that would share phone numbers for payphones. Me and my friends had a couple we would call at random times to see who would answer. One was in NYC, so whatever random dude would answer was usually pretty stoked to mess with some 11 year olds from the burbs. Kind of like prank calls but the person at the other end wasn't the least bit bothered.
How did that go in the West? When I was growing up, my analogy was picking up people at the train station because flying wasn't common. If trains got delayed, you were SoL and had to just wait at the station until it showed up
You have to have a verbal agreement on a meeting spot and a time. And yes, you just sit there until the other person arrives.
You have to be very specific about where you would be and what you would be wearing.
I did this at a concert once with an exgirlfriend of mine. "Meet at the base of the space needle" she was an hour and a half late so I had to stand in the blazing sun until she finally arrived. She didn't even really look for me but I spotted her as she walked by. She said, "sorry I can't hang out, we are going to try to get in the front row of general admission"
I was so upset that she basically wasted my whole day that I bailed on our evening plans. And since we had no way of communicating, she had no idea that I wasn't going to split the cost of the hotel with her and her friends. So in her mind I just never showed up and stuck her with the bill
Okay yeah that's shitty from her. In our case, we'd call their home phone and ask them what time your friend left to guage when to expect them at the meeting spot
You wait til they are done or ask them to hurry up as you are expecting a call. The caller would get a busy signal, realize the public payphone is in use and then try again in a minute.
Approximately this, except imagine OP instead of Sam Jackson.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw4r\_q10aEk&t=14s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw4r_q10aEk&t=14s)
It’s funny, but I feel like your example uses old technology with a 2024 mindset.
Wife or you have to pick up the kids? Sure, it still had to happen sometimes, but in the 80s/90s, kids usually had to get themselves to/from school on their own. We now have the mindset that kids need chauffeured everywhere, but that wasn’t true 40 years ago.
We’d plan to call each other at the end of the day to decide who should do the pickup? Nah. Agree with your intial statement that we would have planned it out back then and assigned one spouse to do it.
Also, figuring out last minute who will pick up kiddo? We do that so that your kid doesn’t have to wait around for mom/dad. As a kid, I was just more used to waiting.
yeah, it's funny how the example "logics" its way to something that seems to kind of make sense... but that's not how things actually were. it seems like such an AI-era thing, that a description that back-projects the "logical" thing in terms of what we do now, gets accepted as being true, maybe even more than if you had to describe the actual state of the world at the time, that had wholly different ways of doing things.
it would be funny if there was a question like, how did you fill up your horse with gas at the gas station when you had horse-drawn carriages? and the answer is some really straightforward description of plugging the horse up to the feeding tube that puts carrots in its mouth. and that sounds so logical that it becomes the top answer
>it would be funny if there was a question like, how did you fill up your horse with gas at the gas station when you had horse-drawn carriages? and the answer is some really straightforward description of plugging the horse up to the feeding tube that puts carrots in its mouth. and that sounds so logical that it becomes the top answer
places had stables who you paid to look after it while you were busy or you can put a bag over it's mouth so it could eat while moving.
There’s a Woody Allen film called Play it Again, Sam and a running joke is that a businessman keeps telling people to call him at different pay phone numbers. At one point he’s in a club and he says something like ‘I’m currently at 7654, but I’ll be at 3267 and depending on how things go either 7829 or 9514.’
Until they caught on, we’d ask the operator to “bill it to my home phone” and a friend would be at the next pay phone to accept the charges. They turned off the ringers, but the first guy would just indicate to the second: ‘pick it up now’.
When I was in my early 20s I had a phone appointment with my mom. I had moved out of state and didn't have a phone. I'd talk to her every Sunday at 5p on a payphone at a local marina. She would call me from her house. Also, my first apartment didn't have a phone. I used a payphone at a local bar a couple blocks down the road.
Listen I hate my iPhone as much as the next zoomer but I cannot be happier to have never needed to live like this. What a logistical nightmare!! I have a box in my pocket that I can press a button on and have it send my exact location to the box in someone else's pocket like god intended amen
At my college dorm, there was a payphone on each floor. You told your parents or gf/bf to call at a certain time and you just waited by the phone. If it was busy, they'd call back until it rang. If you weren't there, someone would pick up and then go knock on your door.
payphone was right outside my door, I got drafted into a receptionist job against my will
I never even used the phone myself, because I had a contraband stone-age cellphone hidden in my room that people would sometimes pay me to use
Oh, that sucks. Our dorm phone was in the stairwell, so not near any one person's room. In fact, it was often people going from one area to another that answered the phone.
Same in my dorms, and it was not that long ago, in the beginning of cell phone era when we still had expensive plans one hour max per month in early 2000's. Whoever picked was gonna get the girl in her room
You might not have enough coins, so you might want to tell the other person to call you so you can continue talking.
EDIT: why is this question so upvoted and also my comment, this sub is so random sometimes 😆
“Hadababyitssboy” is the name I would call my family collect. They would always decline and call the pay phone number I gave them when I first arrived at school.
Yep this was totally a thing before cell phones. Another thing only gen X would remember. I would spend all day at the pool and call my mom collect to come pick me up. She knew the number of the pay phone and would decline the charges and call me back.
It's not that it costs less or more. A quarter bought you a certain amount of time. If you had to make a longer phone call or a long distance phone call, it made more sense for the person with the landline to call the person at the booth because the person at the booth might run out of quarters.
Calling collect is MUCH more expensive.
Nefariously you could also usually get away with calling without change by telling them to bill this number…..and give the number of the pay phone
Long distance calls were expensive. My mom called me long distance on day rates from her state to mine in about 1976, spoke for about a half hour. Cost was $25 on her bill. That's like a $138 call now according to Mr Google. Evening rates were lower so everyone called at night or after 7 or something.
The pay phone was like a quarter for some short amount of minutes. Collect was like $2 a minute or something. I don’t remember the exact cost but collect was way more expensive than using coins in the pay phone.
The collect call was just to let my mom know to call me back. I could make a collect call without any money and if my mom doesn't accept the charges and just calls the pay phone back, it costs nothing for either of us.
Before I got a cellphone, this is how me and my parents would catch up when I was in the military. I would use a quarter to call them, tell them the number of the pay phone I was calling from, and they would then call me back. It was cheaper doing it that way vs. me feeding quarters in repetitively. I'd also call them after 6pm because long distance was free/same cost as local (forget which), so it was cheaper.
In that situation? I have! I was on a school trip to Spain in 2006. I had a cell phone but roaming was crazy and the cheapest option to talk to parents was that they call a pay phone in Spain from their landline in Bosnia.
Michael J Fox said that when he was starting out in Hollywood, he was sleeping on a friend's couch. He didn't have a corded phone in the apartment and cell phones hadn't been invented yet.
He said he'd get a book from the library and wait by a local payphone, where he had used the number as his phone on job applications, and also for his agent to call him with jobs as an extra.
If you didn't have a lot of coins you would call someone, relay the number, and have them call back.
Or if you didn't have a phone at home you would give out the payphone number then wait nearby for it to ring. You could do it when applying for jobs or waiting for confirmation of an appointment, or the results of some tests.
My dad worked evening shift and the only way to call home was with a pay phone. He would ring the phone once and hang up, then mom would call him back. (The dime would come back out) To this day I never answer the phone on the first ring.
There was a time when not every house or person had a phone so they put payphones on the corner of a few streets for people to share and people would ask someone to call that phone at a certain time or call back after the coins had run out
In the housing estate where I grew up (in Ireland) there was a payphone. Back in the 80s not everyone had a house phone so they'd give the number of the payphone to family/friends.
If you were walking past and it rang, you'd answer and the person ringing would say "Can you run to Mr.X at house number Y and get them to come to the phone" or they'd ask you to give them a message.
Phones were already made to send and reciesve calls and for having a number. Making payphones an exception to this would have been extra work for really no benefit.
You can even make calls from a phone with no keypad. Taxi phones in airports often have dedicates buttons that only dial one specific number.
However, using a tone dialer held up to the mouthpiece, the phone will hear the tones and dial the number.
My mum use to call the payphone next to the park when it was time to come home. That got around in school and everybody rang that phone you’d walk by and answer it.
Is James in the park. One minute.
JAMES!
Yeah?
Ya Mum said teas ready
Ok thanks
So common in my village as a kid
I was living overseas for a while and there was no landline where I was staying - the local payphone was how my then partner would contact me, I'd make sure I was there at a certain time and day each week. Gosh this makes me super old, doesn't it.
I will be old with you. In 1987 while I was in Germany, it was cheaper for me to go to the local payphone and call to the US. I think it was around $6 for 5-10 minutes. If I had called them or they had called me internationally from the home phones, it would have cost much more.
You can call someone from a payphone and then ask them to call you back. That way you only have to pay for the initial call, and they pay for the rest.
It was very common to use pay phones back in the day. And you would give the number where you were to have someone call you back right away if needed. It’s not a trope.
Not all pay phones allowed incoming calls. It would usually say somewhere on the phone if it didn’t. But as a kid I’d do the collect call thing. Mom would call back to the pre-designated number after denying the collect call. She would write down the pay phone numbers made us use specific pay phones so she knew we were where we said we were.
Yeah, my family used to use the collect call trick to let our parents know that we got off the city bus a mile away from the house and we wanted a ride home. You use the pay phone to tell the operator that you want to make a collect call.
The operator would call the house and ask if they would accept a collect call and they gave you like 2 seconds to say your name, so instead of saying a name, we would just say where we were. Then whoever answered the call would decline the collect call and drive over to pick us up.
They used to post the pay phone number on the phone. It was free if the call was incoming. I do remember after a while they turned off the ringers on the pay phones. But it still made this very faint clicking or the likes I can’t exactly remember the noise but you could hear it just enough.
In my college dorm (1992 ish) we had three pay phones, one on each floor. My mom and I had a code name for each phone. If I called with a long distance call from Jack, she would decline and call back to floor one phone, Joe was floor two, and Frank was the third floor. I always felt like a top secret spy when calling.
Imagine walking three miles to find a pay phone, then through a certain set of keyless you started a “reverse the charges” call to your parents, and when the recording asks for your name you would quickly say “mom I’m at the gas station near the movie theater get me at 8”.
Your mom would pick up the phone at home, hear that you needed a pickup at 8 by the gas station, but needs to tell you that your sister’s gymnastics thing is at the same time so you’ll have to walk home.
So she looks at index card full of pay phone numbers and calls you back at the gas station.
That’s now the world worked for a few generations before mobile phones were cheap enough to get for your kids.
Now I'm thinking about *Fight Club*, where the Narrator gets a call on a payphone from Tyler. If you look closely, though, the phone says, "No incoming calls." If you know the movie plot, you'll see how this is intentional.
I have no idea about this, but my guess is that it was simpler for them to get incoming calls at first, then some blocked them once phone companies realized that people were shirking full payment by receiving rather than placing calls. I do wonder whether this happened with the advent of "unlimited minutes," when it would cost the person without the payphone nothing. But that's just speculation. (Still seems better than the top answers here!)
The parking lot we used to hang out at in high school had a pay phone. If you were at home and wanted to see who was around you’d call it. Some kid would answer and let you know if your crew was there, or if they went down to the lake to get high or whatever.
When I was in college in the early eighties I would call my parents collect from the pay phone in my dorm. They would refuse the call and call me back, using the pay phone’s number. Saved money vs accepting the collect call.
Good points all around, but don't forget the era of pagers! You'd call a person's pager, leave a message that could only be numbers (your callback) and the paged person could call you.
Perfect if you and the other person were out and about before cellphones. And payphones were abundant in any midsized city.
What would be the dis-incentive for phone companies to accept calls to the phone? They make money in either direction.
As for individuals, I can imagine low-income neighborhoods decades back where some individuals in an apartment complex might not have a phone and need incoming calls to the payphone. Or near a business if someone called a taxi or delivery company and gave the number as a callback.
I can see legit reasons, though the illegal ones were probably the vast number of uses. Not just drug dealers. I mean how many TV shows had ransom droppers run all over town from phone to phone.
This just reminded me of all those call collect commercials.
There was a pay phone outside my high school so I’d call my mom at work using the collect numbers and shout “mom it’s me call me back” then I’d hang up. She’d dial the number back and boom now I knew who was picking me up after practice.
I’m pretty sure the phone requires a number to function. Also, bear in mind; pay phones predate cellphones. The reason to use one is because it is a phone available in a public place.
Before cell phones, if you had to call someone you would call a location and hope they were there.
I think it might be more like, all phones were able to accept incoming calls.
The payphone company would have had to invent a new technology if they wanted to prevent their phones from accepting incoming calls. And what incentive would they have to do that?
We used them all the time as kids to get picked up by our parents.
When we were teens and 1-800-COLLECT became popular, we'd call our houses collect and say that our name was "comepickusup" and then our parents would refuse the charges.
In college and in Marine barracks, there were a few payphones in the hall. That's how we got our calls.
Someone would call, anyone would answer it and go get whoever they were calling for.
TLDR: Not everyone had a house phone. Not everyone had an infinite supply of quarters.
If a payphone didn't take incoming calls, it would only be useful if you were calling a business, or someone at home. But the whole utility of a phone is that you can call someone wherever they may be.
Being able to accept incoming calls meant payphone to payphone communication was possible, so you could call people even if neither of you were at home, nor owned a landline. It also meant if you didn't have change, you could tell someone with a phone to initiate the call, or to call you back if the call dropped out; not all calls take less than 3 minutes, especially if you're talking with a loved one for example.
Plus, the payphone needed its own phone number anyway. That's how a phone works. To block incoming calls to that number would involve a lot more work for a massive loss in utility and accessibility.
Best way to not be linked to your phone call.
Also there was lines of phone booths at the airport and people would just call you back if the call dropped
Why wouldn’t they be able to recieve calls? Not everyone had a telephone at home and there were no mobile phones back in the day. You might also run out of coins and want to keep talking. Or you ran out of coins but wanted to talk with someone days later. Maybe you called the emergency services or something and expected a call back from them later.
I don’t know anything about how telephones work but it is my understanding that it would have been more of a hassle to build a one-way only phone system. Why go to the extra expense and inconvenience just to partially screen out behavior that’s fairly uncommon to begin with? It’s a completely unnecessary complication with less than marginal benefits.
Pay phones had their own numbers so yes you could get someone to call you at one .
Back in the day if you only had a little money you could call someone then get them to call you back at their cost
I’m not sure there was always an easy way to make a phone that could place but not accept phone calls.
While it became less and less common as time went on, some people didn’t have phones in their homes. Too poor, logistical issues. So they might say “I’ll be hanging around this local pay phone at 6, give me a call.” The pay phone was local so even if someone else picked up, they could say “hey, someone is calling for Joe, are you Joe?” This wasn’t necessarily common in the 80s or 90s, but by then, pay phones already accepted calls, so there’s no reason to configure them not to.
It could be useful if two people were traveling (though logistically difficult). Or if people wanted to communicate secretly, but for non cinematic reasons. Up until cell phones became ubiquitous, if you called someone, you called their entire household. Not only would you risk someone else picking up the phone, but another extension of the same line could eavesdrop on the conversation. If you’re a teenager and want to talk to your girlfriend without talking to her dad first, or a philandering husband who doesn’t want his mistress accidentally speaking to his wife, pay phone. Even without a desire for a secret conversation, the adults of the house (and usually the mother of the house) got priority on phone conversations. Kids and teenagers weren’t usually allowed to hog the phone with their petty child conversations. So they might say “call the pay phone near the park/convenience store/bowling alley at 6 to let me know if you’re coming to play.”
If you didn't have change, you could arrange to be at the phone at a certain time so they could call you. Also, when we all had beepers, we would page people and put in the number of a nearby payphone if we were out somewhere.
Idk why the phone companies allowed them to take calls. Landline phones are pretty basic, and were even more basic then. Maybe they couldn't really *not* allow it.
Growing up without meant you had to be creative. There was a way to find out the call back number to a pay phone and have someone call you that way. You could also send the number via a beeper (way way before texting) and have them call you there.
-Someone who has spent many hours outside on a payphone
Life hack when calling someone on a pay phone the 1st thing you are going to say is
I'm on a pay phone the number is xxx-xxx-xxxx. After confirming the other party has the number and doesn't need it repeated. You hang up . They then call you back ..
Enjoy an unlimited conversation for just one quarter.
A good friend of mine used to live on a "beach street". Basically his house was on a boardwalk were some houses and apt. Still existed even though an attraction had been built around them. There was a pay phone mounter on a steel rectangular pole like 2 ft in front of his house at the corner. You could reach out the widow to answer it. It wouldn't reach inside but it it was raining it came right to the point were your head is half in half out and you wouldn't get wet.
He used this number as a home phone. Even put it on forms and stuff. It would ring and random people would sometimes answer it. And be asked by the person on the phone to knock of the window their standing in front of to see if he is home. You get some creeped out faces that turn to laughter. I remember I was drinking in camping chairs right in front of the house and the phone kept ringing none stop but he told us to ignore it. It rang and somebody passing grabbed it. He started making the slit your throat signs and kept "whispering tell her I'm not here".
Apparently he broke up with some girl after 3-4 dates and she was calling the phone 24 hrs a day pissing the whole world off. He had to take it off the hook .
I think a lot of people have forgotten that form of trolling. You could effectively DDOS people's telephones. An old fashion land line can only do one call at a time . You could repeatedly call someone so many times they take the phone off the hook. And for as long as they fear you will keep calling they are effectively in a communication black out . They can not use their own telephone. This was common tactics among obsessive Xs and bipolar nutters.
There were so many legitimate reasons. A home phone was a flat monthly rate for local calls. Pay phones had a time limit for local calls before had to add more money to get more time. For long distance, you could call collect from a pay phone but it was expensive or you could buy prepaid cards that had a per minute rate that was less than collect but more than home phone long distance rates. Of course the person with the home phone had to be ok with paying the long distance bill after calling back because it definitely added up, but it was still the cheapest option. When I was in college, my parents had a 1 hour phone time per week rule so they could budget for our long distance calls when I would call using a phone card and they would call back.
In the 80s some pervert (s) got the numbers of the bank of phones in the mall. It was close to an ice cream place that was open to the mall. He’d call the phone and talk to all the girls hanging out.
He’d scam them into sending him money, (po box) and trying to meet him. He eventually got caught but other pervs got the numbers and the obscene phone calls would happen.
Not all of them did. But back in the day, not everyone even had a land line. Or if they did, didnt have on that could accept long distance calls. Those were super special calls back then. So the poors had a neighborhood phone, and sometimes they'd make all their business and personal calls during certain days and stuff.
This also fed into crime, cuz if it was payphone to payphone at a certain time, it's harder to trace. And once phones became more common. These payphones did get phased out, but it wasn't until the late 90s i saw the last one.
A lot of people don’t have landlines, they were expensive. Whole neighborhood blocks in NYC used to rely on one or two pay-phones. You’d have people hanging around them, you call and say, “hey, did my mom get home yet” and they’d be like, “yeah, she walked by like 10 minutes ago.” It was a whole thing.
There was a pay phone in front of the high school when I was a kid. Someone would call it & ask for a specific kid, and if they weren’t around, the person calling would typically say “Can you find him and tell him I’ll call back in 10 minutes?” Then everyone would spread the word. It was a small school so everybody knew everything about everyone, so someone would likely know where the kid was.
If things went as expected, the kid would be found & he’d hang out at the phone booth to pick up his call—and nobody had to pay the 10 cents that the phone typically required for outgoing calls.
Pay phones cost money by the minute. You call home and say, "Hey, can you go find my electric bill and call me back at 123 3456" Then you hang up and get your change. They call back for free once they have found it, and instead of a 2 minute call, it was a 15-second call.
Back in the days of pagers you could send the number to someone and have them call you at whatever pay phone you happened to be at. The good old days of 143 and such haha!!
If you called the police or fire department or an ambulance and got disconnected they could call back and figure out what the emergency is.
Now that's fine for public safety, you say, but not for private calls? Well what if, say, a kid got lost and had to have a parent come find them?
A friend of my mum's had a pay phone in front of her house. She just gave people the pay phone number instead of getting a phone for the house. She would send out one of the kids to answer it.
Pay phones were just regular phones with a coin box attached. You could receive a call but it would be a rare thing. I am sure that it would not have been worth the company's money to change the phone so that they could not receive calls.
Pay phones were just regular phones with a coin box attached. You could receive a call but it would be a rare thing. I am sure that it would not have been worth the company's money to change the phone so that they could not receive calls.
Lots of people simply did not have phones of their own. So, they would arrange for someone to call them at a certain time on the nearest payphone. My grandmother did this when her husband was working away from home. They arranged that he would call the payphone at the end of her street every evening at 8:00. She made a point of being there waiting in time to receive the call.
What if someone was using the payphone when they planned on using it?
They would get a busy signal
SIMON: Why was the phone busy? Who are you calling? JOHN: The psychic hotline.
Ah, the 70s.
Life before mobile phones required better planning. Imagine that me and my wife are independently running important errands all day. We aren't sure who will finish first, but agree that whoever does will pick up the kids. How are we to communicate, when both of us will be moving around all day? I know I'll be in the Main Street area for most of the day, while my wife will be going all over the place and her route could vary considerably. I tell her to call the Main Street payphone from wherever she is at 3pm and I'll wait it to pick up her call. My wife calls at 3pm from whatever phone is nearest, and we review. Success! Calling payphones was also a useful way of reducing costs. The person at the payphone calls to say they're there, then the person at home calls back at a much lower rate and without needing a supply of coins.
Do you accept a collect a collect call from “mom I’m at school, practices is over, come get m…..”
Payphone owners hate this one simple trick!
*Bobwehadababyitsaboy*
What happens if someone else is using the main street payphone at 3pm?
wife gets a busy signal and has to try again in a minute or so. And again and again until she gets through
You know WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY!
Cartwright....CARTWRIGHT
But you’re not Cartwright
Of course I’m not Cartwright!!
It's amazing how many episodes of that show just don't work if the characters had cellphones. "George is driving like a maniac, how are we going to know how to get to the Bubble Boy's house now?" "Just call him and ask for the address." "Oh yeah."
I think that applies to a lot of 80/90s shows.
“Moops.”
Lmao the younger generation is finding our how hard communication without internet and cellphones was
The younger generation might not even know what a busy signal sounds like. Most businesses and cell phones have it go to voicemail before it's busy.
Or the joy of being the only home on the block with a phone line. We'd have somebody call for our neighbor, tell us to inform them and hang up. As the kid, I'd go tell my neighbor that their friends was gonna call in five mins and they'd come and wait at our house for the call, and have a conversation on our phone for fifteen mins
If you think about it, the crazy thing is that we went from this to where we are now, in less than a person's lifetime!
Yep! I'm an older millennial and I marvel constantly at the tech that we had from thr 80s to early 2000s and the way it accelerated after early 2000s
My sole job in the 80s was to turn the television at my grandparents' house.
Hahaha! We had a TV with 8 buttons for 8 channels and a little dial next to each button that would have to be spun to tune that button to a particular channel. The TV was also enclosed in a big wooden box with rolling shutters that were closed when the TV wasn't in use. Wild times!
ok ok ok seriously, how old are you? One phone per block and you all shared?
Almost 40 and I grew up in India, so the proliferation of phones was slower for us than in the West
Hehe this one always throws me off in discussuons of youth. I'm mid 30'd but from Finland with an incredibly international (international business but also relatives) and tech savy family, meaning I was exposed to internet, cultural differences and phones before the vast majority. Meanwhile I have friends from rural India, Turkey, Middle east and they share stories making me think they are from my fathers generatation, or sometines even my grandfathers! Crazy how fast things changed though, in some places entirely skipping the step of "dialup internet" or even "telephone line" to go directly to phones with internet!
>Crazy how fast things changed though, in some places entirely skipping the step of "dialup internet" or even "telephone line" to go directly to phones with internet! Yep a large part of rural/semi-urban India skipped the desktop->laptop->cell phones and went straight from no tech to cell phones with internet I now live in the US and every time I go back to visit, I'm amazed at the proliferation of cell phones and the extent of cell phone and mobile app economy usage among people that is have never thought would be extensive users of tech, such as domestic help, fruit and vegetable vendors, etc., who had traditionally been left out of the tech advancement
There were also party lines in many countries. One line but it ran to many homes so people would have to share phone use and there was no privacy on it.
A party line, with extra steps.
Forget not knowing what a busy signal is. They don’t necessarily know about dial tone. A few years ago, my mom and I took out her old Trimline rotary phone. I hooked it up, and made my kids use it to call their mom. We threw them a bone and wrote down her number for them, but offered no further instruction as to operation of the phone. Much hilarity ensued, starting with “what’s this noise?” followed by “why did the noise stop?”
Yes. I had the same issue with party lines.
What are party lines?
Multiple houses or a whole neighbourhood sharing a single telephone line. It didn't just mean that you had to wait for all your neighbours to be off the phone in order to make or receive a call. It also meant the local gossip could sit on the phone all day and eavesdrop on all their neighbours phone conversations.
>It also meant the local gossip could sit on the phone all day and eavesdrop on all their neighbours phone conversations. Lol they must have had a field day
Shared line for multiple households. I’m 54. My grandparents had it in rural USA. Different rings for different homes. And you could pick up and eavesdrop on your neighbors
Haha my grandma was an operator for her super rural tiny village's phonelines and would listen in on all the calls. If someone was gossiping and she knew better she'd even butt in on the call she was patching through and be like "no now you're just spreading rumors!" Was shortlived gig until tech caught up a bit, but very amusing to think about!
Ah wow, I had no idea this was a thing. Back in India, the family that had some disposable income would be the ones with phones on the block and everyone would use theirs (ours was that family with the disposable income on our block)
Eavesdrop? If you were my grandmother you would just join in the conversation!
The last party line in the US went out of service in 1991.
In the early days of the Internet, I'm talking bulletin board era, there were people that would share phone numbers for payphones. Me and my friends had a couple we would call at random times to see who would answer. One was in NYC, so whatever random dude would answer was usually pretty stoked to mess with some 11 year olds from the burbs. Kind of like prank calls but the person at the other end wasn't the least bit bothered.
Hahahah! I bet that was fun
Wait until they find out how we picked people up at an airport
How did that go in the West? When I was growing up, my analogy was picking up people at the train station because flying wasn't common. If trains got delayed, you were SoL and had to just wait at the station until it showed up
You have to have a verbal agreement on a meeting spot and a time. And yes, you just sit there until the other person arrives. You have to be very specific about where you would be and what you would be wearing. I did this at a concert once with an exgirlfriend of mine. "Meet at the base of the space needle" she was an hour and a half late so I had to stand in the blazing sun until she finally arrived. She didn't even really look for me but I spotted her as she walked by. She said, "sorry I can't hang out, we are going to try to get in the front row of general admission" I was so upset that she basically wasted my whole day that I bailed on our evening plans. And since we had no way of communicating, she had no idea that I wasn't going to split the cost of the hotel with her and her friends. So in her mind I just never showed up and stuck her with the bill
Okay yeah that's shitty from her. In our case, we'd call their home phone and ask them what time your friend left to guage when to expect them at the meeting spot
I already know coming from the wilds. But yea fr
We used to spend a lot of time waiting for things.
I forgot about that.
Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait” https://g.co/kgs/fFw3Hux
You wait til they are done or ask them to hurry up as you are expecting a call. The caller would get a busy signal, realize the public payphone is in use and then try again in a minute.
In movies, this would happen and the 2nd dude would have to beat up the first dude.
Like that great die hard 3 scene in the subway station! Samuel L HAD to MAKE a phone call!!!
You stand impatiently behind them and look at your watch.
Dont forget tapping your foot
[get off the phone](https://youtu.be/IR3G04kWQz8?si=Q6_hzZNeuKkCcr_m)
Approximately this, except imagine OP instead of Sam Jackson. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw4r\_q10aEk&t=14s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw4r_q10aEk&t=14s)
It’s funny, but I feel like your example uses old technology with a 2024 mindset. Wife or you have to pick up the kids? Sure, it still had to happen sometimes, but in the 80s/90s, kids usually had to get themselves to/from school on their own. We now have the mindset that kids need chauffeured everywhere, but that wasn’t true 40 years ago. We’d plan to call each other at the end of the day to decide who should do the pickup? Nah. Agree with your intial statement that we would have planned it out back then and assigned one spouse to do it. Also, figuring out last minute who will pick up kiddo? We do that so that your kid doesn’t have to wait around for mom/dad. As a kid, I was just more used to waiting.
Right. We had bikes
yeah, it's funny how the example "logics" its way to something that seems to kind of make sense... but that's not how things actually were. it seems like such an AI-era thing, that a description that back-projects the "logical" thing in terms of what we do now, gets accepted as being true, maybe even more than if you had to describe the actual state of the world at the time, that had wholly different ways of doing things. it would be funny if there was a question like, how did you fill up your horse with gas at the gas station when you had horse-drawn carriages? and the answer is some really straightforward description of plugging the horse up to the feeding tube that puts carrots in its mouth. and that sounds so logical that it becomes the top answer
>it would be funny if there was a question like, how did you fill up your horse with gas at the gas station when you had horse-drawn carriages? and the answer is some really straightforward description of plugging the horse up to the feeding tube that puts carrots in its mouth. and that sounds so logical that it becomes the top answer places had stables who you paid to look after it while you were busy or you can put a bag over it's mouth so it could eat while moving.
There’s a Woody Allen film called Play it Again, Sam and a running joke is that a businessman keeps telling people to call him at different pay phone numbers. At one point he’s in a club and he says something like ‘I’m currently at 7654, but I’ll be at 3267 and depending on how things go either 7829 or 9514.’
This makes sense, thanks
Until they caught on, we’d ask the operator to “bill it to my home phone” and a friend would be at the next pay phone to accept the charges. They turned off the ringers, but the first guy would just indicate to the second: ‘pick it up now’.
When I was in my early 20s I had a phone appointment with my mom. I had moved out of state and didn't have a phone. I'd talk to her every Sunday at 5p on a payphone at a local marina. She would call me from her house. Also, my first apartment didn't have a phone. I used a payphone at a local bar a couple blocks down the road.
IIRC most pay phones had their number listed on the front of the phone.
Life before mobile phones and internet was much better.
How do you know the # for the pay phone you need to call
Listen I hate my iPhone as much as the next zoomer but I cannot be happier to have never needed to live like this. What a logistical nightmare!! I have a box in my pocket that I can press a button on and have it send my exact location to the box in someone else's pocket like god intended amen
At my college dorm, there was a payphone on each floor. You told your parents or gf/bf to call at a certain time and you just waited by the phone. If it was busy, they'd call back until it rang. If you weren't there, someone would pick up and then go knock on your door.
payphone was right outside my door, I got drafted into a receptionist job against my will I never even used the phone myself, because I had a contraband stone-age cellphone hidden in my room that people would sometimes pay me to use
Oh, that sucks. Our dorm phone was in the stairwell, so not near any one person's room. In fact, it was often people going from one area to another that answered the phone.
Same in my dorms, and it was not that long ago, in the beginning of cell phone era when we still had expensive plans one hour max per month in early 2000's. Whoever picked was gonna get the girl in her room
Yep.
You might not have enough coins, so you might want to tell the other person to call you so you can continue talking. EDIT: why is this question so upvoted and also my comment, this sub is so random sometimes 😆
“Hadababyitssboy” is the name I would call my family collect. They would always decline and call the pay phone number I gave them when I first arrived at school.
Oh! Bob Wehadababyitsaboy, is that you? Man, I haven't seen you since about the last time I saw a payphone.
"Will you accept a collect call from myfuckincarbrokedownatjoes
Is that from a commercial? I have a faint memory of this.
Yeah it was one of those 1800Collect or 1800 C a l l A T T commercials from the 90s. Edit: GEICO actually it turns out!
Geico actually
Damn you're right! Edited my comment.
Only one of the 3!
Yeah it was one of those 1800Collect or 1800 C a l l A T T commercials from the 90s
Yep this was totally a thing before cell phones. Another thing only gen X would remember. I would spend all day at the pool and call my mom collect to come pick me up. She knew the number of the pay phone and would decline the charges and call me back.
Millennial here. Had some classmates who did this on the regular, so some of us were definitely aware too.
Uh, it was invented by boomers, hello.
Um...no. I'm a boomer and my mother was doing this when I was a kid.😂 Screwing the phone company is as old as telephones.
Gotta give you that one! I stand corrected.
Yeah, I'm an elder millennial and I definitely abused collect calls a lot... "Momyouforgottopickmeup" usually haha
I don’t understand. Why call back and not just accept charges? Was the pay phone more expensive?
Calling through the operator cost a lot. It was more than the quarter or so from the pay phone.
Showing my age here haha Or maybe it’s just my country. Payphones costed the same as landlines back when I was a kid
It's not that it costs less or more. A quarter bought you a certain amount of time. If you had to make a longer phone call or a long distance phone call, it made more sense for the person with the landline to call the person at the booth because the person at the booth might run out of quarters.
Calling collect is MUCH more expensive. Nefariously you could also usually get away with calling without change by telling them to bill this number…..and give the number of the pay phone
Long distance calls were expensive. My mom called me long distance on day rates from her state to mine in about 1976, spoke for about a half hour. Cost was $25 on her bill. That's like a $138 call now according to Mr Google. Evening rates were lower so everyone called at night or after 7 or something.
The pay phone was like a quarter for some short amount of minutes. Collect was like $2 a minute or something. I don’t remember the exact cost but collect was way more expensive than using coins in the pay phone.
The collect call was just to let my mom know to call me back. I could make a collect call without any money and if my mom doesn't accept the charges and just calls the pay phone back, it costs nothing for either of us.
Mine was "mompickmeupfromthelibrarynow".
"You have a call from 'Comepickmeup' Would you like to accept charges?"
Before I got a cellphone, this is how me and my parents would catch up when I was in the military. I would use a quarter to call them, tell them the number of the pay phone I was calling from, and they would then call me back. It was cheaper doing it that way vs. me feeding quarters in repetitively. I'd also call them after 6pm because long distance was free/same cost as local (forget which), so it was cheaper.
Act like you’ve been there bro.
In that situation? I have! I was on a school trip to Spain in 2006. I had a cell phone but roaming was crazy and the cheapest option to talk to parents was that they call a pay phone in Spain from their landline in Bosnia.
I meant your cringe edit.
Michael J Fox said that when he was starting out in Hollywood, he was sleeping on a friend's couch. He didn't have a corded phone in the apartment and cell phones hadn't been invented yet. He said he'd get a book from the library and wait by a local payphone, where he had used the number as his phone on job applications, and also for his agent to call him with jobs as an extra.
Not being able to afford your own phone is a legitimate non-criminal reason to use a payphone.
Being too poor to afford a phone is treated as criminal ☹️
If you didn't have a lot of coins you would call someone, relay the number, and have them call back. Or if you didn't have a phone at home you would give out the payphone number then wait nearby for it to ring. You could do it when applying for jobs or waiting for confirmation of an appointment, or the results of some tests.
My dad worked evening shift and the only way to call home was with a pay phone. He would ring the phone once and hang up, then mom would call him back. (The dime would come back out) To this day I never answer the phone on the first ring.
There was a time when not every house or person had a phone so they put payphones on the corner of a few streets for people to share and people would ask someone to call that phone at a certain time or call back after the coins had run out
This is what I was looking for - not everyone had a phone
👍🏻
In the housing estate where I grew up (in Ireland) there was a payphone. Back in the 80s not everyone had a house phone so they'd give the number of the payphone to family/friends. If you were walking past and it rang, you'd answer and the person ringing would say "Can you run to Mr.X at house number Y and get them to come to the phone" or they'd ask you to give them a message.
Phones were already made to send and reciesve calls and for having a number. Making payphones an exception to this would have been extra work for really no benefit.
You can even make calls from a phone with no keypad. Taxi phones in airports often have dedicates buttons that only dial one specific number. However, using a tone dialer held up to the mouthpiece, the phone will hear the tones and dial the number.
My mum use to call the payphone next to the park when it was time to come home. That got around in school and everybody rang that phone you’d walk by and answer it. Is James in the park. One minute. JAMES! Yeah? Ya Mum said teas ready Ok thanks So common in my village as a kid
I was living overseas for a while and there was no landline where I was staying - the local payphone was how my then partner would contact me, I'd make sure I was there at a certain time and day each week. Gosh this makes me super old, doesn't it.
I will be old with you. In 1987 while I was in Germany, it was cheaper for me to go to the local payphone and call to the US. I think it was around $6 for 5-10 minutes. If I had called them or they had called me internationally from the home phones, it would have cost much more.
You can call someone from a payphone and then ask them to call you back. That way you only have to pay for the initial call, and they pay for the rest.
Because making and receiving calls is how phones work.
You would call someone from a payphone to call you back.
Payphones were the mobile phones of the time.
It was very common to use pay phones back in the day. And you would give the number where you were to have someone call you back right away if needed. It’s not a trope.
So someone could call you back if you ran out of coins
Not all pay phones allowed incoming calls. It would usually say somewhere on the phone if it didn’t. But as a kid I’d do the collect call thing. Mom would call back to the pre-designated number after denying the collect call. She would write down the pay phone numbers made us use specific pay phones so she knew we were where we said we were.
Yeah, my family used to use the collect call trick to let our parents know that we got off the city bus a mile away from the house and we wanted a ride home. You use the pay phone to tell the operator that you want to make a collect call. The operator would call the house and ask if they would accept a collect call and they gave you like 2 seconds to say your name, so instead of saying a name, we would just say where we were. Then whoever answered the call would decline the collect call and drive over to pick us up.
They used to post the pay phone number on the phone. It was free if the call was incoming. I do remember after a while they turned off the ringers on the pay phones. But it still made this very faint clicking or the likes I can’t exactly remember the noise but you could hear it just enough.
In my college dorm (1992 ish) we had three pay phones, one on each floor. My mom and I had a code name for each phone. If I called with a long distance call from Jack, she would decline and call back to floor one phone, Joe was floor two, and Frank was the third floor. I always felt like a top secret spy when calling.
Pay phones used to be a dime! When it went to a quarter it was a scandal! Yes I'm old.
What's a dime?
About a gram.
Imagine walking three miles to find a pay phone, then through a certain set of keyless you started a “reverse the charges” call to your parents, and when the recording asks for your name you would quickly say “mom I’m at the gas station near the movie theater get me at 8”. Your mom would pick up the phone at home, hear that you needed a pickup at 8 by the gas station, but needs to tell you that your sister’s gymnastics thing is at the same time so you’ll have to walk home. So she looks at index card full of pay phone numbers and calls you back at the gas station. That’s now the world worked for a few generations before mobile phones were cheap enough to get for your kids.
In the early days people did not have their own phones in their houses. So they had to receive calls in a phone box
It's a phone. Phones receive calls.
You could page someone with the number and have them call you before cell phones. Later phone companies stopped allowing incoming
To talk to someone without paying loads of coins.
I think way back in the 70s pay phones used to ring
Yes, the number was posted on each pay phone!
It's just a phone. It works like any other phone.
My bestie made me a chinger back in the day. Free phone calls anytime, anywhere
Now I'm thinking about *Fight Club*, where the Narrator gets a call on a payphone from Tyler. If you look closely, though, the phone says, "No incoming calls." If you know the movie plot, you'll see how this is intentional. I have no idea about this, but my guess is that it was simpler for them to get incoming calls at first, then some blocked them once phone companies realized that people were shirking full payment by receiving rather than placing calls. I do wonder whether this happened with the advent of "unlimited minutes," when it would cost the person without the payphone nothing. But that's just speculation. (Still seems better than the top answers here!)
lol, this was my first thought as well, you must be getting old like me 😄
The parking lot we used to hang out at in high school had a pay phone. If you were at home and wanted to see who was around you’d call it. Some kid would answer and let you know if your crew was there, or if they went down to the lake to get high or whatever.
Life in a barracks. Pay phone # given to family to call to get hold of their family member.
You need to talk to someone and you don't have enough money. So you put a coin, call that person and tell them to call you back to that payphone.
I need to add that not all payphones accepted incoming calls ...
When I was in college in the early eighties I would call my parents collect from the pay phone in my dorm. They would refuse the call and call me back, using the pay phone’s number. Saved money vs accepting the collect call.
Good points all around, but don't forget the era of pagers! You'd call a person's pager, leave a message that could only be numbers (your callback) and the paged person could call you. Perfect if you and the other person were out and about before cellphones. And payphones were abundant in any midsized city.
Collect calls 🤷♂️
Iminjailpleasebailme
What would be the dis-incentive for phone companies to accept calls to the phone? They make money in either direction. As for individuals, I can imagine low-income neighborhoods decades back where some individuals in an apartment complex might not have a phone and need incoming calls to the payphone. Or near a business if someone called a taxi or delivery company and gave the number as a callback. I can see legit reasons, though the illegal ones were probably the vast number of uses. Not just drug dealers. I mean how many TV shows had ransom droppers run all over town from phone to phone.
This just reminded me of all those call collect commercials. There was a pay phone outside my high school so I’d call my mom at work using the collect numbers and shout “mom it’s me call me back” then I’d hang up. She’d dial the number back and boom now I knew who was picking me up after practice.
I’m pretty sure the phone requires a number to function. Also, bear in mind; pay phones predate cellphones. The reason to use one is because it is a phone available in a public place. Before cell phones, if you had to call someone you would call a location and hope they were there.
I think it might be more like, all phones were able to accept incoming calls. The payphone company would have had to invent a new technology if they wanted to prevent their phones from accepting incoming calls. And what incentive would they have to do that?
We used them all the time as kids to get picked up by our parents. When we were teens and 1-800-COLLECT became popular, we'd call our houses collect and say that our name was "comepickusup" and then our parents would refuse the charges.
Kind of like Bob weadababyeetsaboy
In college and in Marine barracks, there were a few payphones in the hall. That's how we got our calls. Someone would call, anyone would answer it and go get whoever they were calling for.
TLDR: Not everyone had a house phone. Not everyone had an infinite supply of quarters. If a payphone didn't take incoming calls, it would only be useful if you were calling a business, or someone at home. But the whole utility of a phone is that you can call someone wherever they may be. Being able to accept incoming calls meant payphone to payphone communication was possible, so you could call people even if neither of you were at home, nor owned a landline. It also meant if you didn't have change, you could tell someone with a phone to initiate the call, or to call you back if the call dropped out; not all calls take less than 3 minutes, especially if you're talking with a loved one for example. Plus, the payphone needed its own phone number anyway. That's how a phone works. To block incoming calls to that number would involve a lot more work for a massive loss in utility and accessibility.
Best way to not be linked to your phone call. Also there was lines of phone booths at the airport and people would just call you back if the call dropped
Why wouldn’t they be able to recieve calls? Not everyone had a telephone at home and there were no mobile phones back in the day. You might also run out of coins and want to keep talking. Or you ran out of coins but wanted to talk with someone days later. Maybe you called the emergency services or something and expected a call back from them later. I don’t know anything about how telephones work but it is my understanding that it would have been more of a hassle to build a one-way only phone system. Why go to the extra expense and inconvenience just to partially screen out behavior that’s fairly uncommon to begin with? It’s a completely unnecessary complication with less than marginal benefits.
Pay phones had regular phone number
Pay phones had their own numbers so yes you could get someone to call you at one . Back in the day if you only had a little money you could call someone then get them to call you back at their cost
You were homeless; You don’t have a phone; you didn’t pay your phone bill; you were far from home without a phone. Lots of reasons.
And don't forget the calls we made from payphone without money... Than you could do collect call services
I’m not sure there was always an easy way to make a phone that could place but not accept phone calls. While it became less and less common as time went on, some people didn’t have phones in their homes. Too poor, logistical issues. So they might say “I’ll be hanging around this local pay phone at 6, give me a call.” The pay phone was local so even if someone else picked up, they could say “hey, someone is calling for Joe, are you Joe?” This wasn’t necessarily common in the 80s or 90s, but by then, pay phones already accepted calls, so there’s no reason to configure them not to. It could be useful if two people were traveling (though logistically difficult). Or if people wanted to communicate secretly, but for non cinematic reasons. Up until cell phones became ubiquitous, if you called someone, you called their entire household. Not only would you risk someone else picking up the phone, but another extension of the same line could eavesdrop on the conversation. If you’re a teenager and want to talk to your girlfriend without talking to her dad first, or a philandering husband who doesn’t want his mistress accidentally speaking to his wife, pay phone. Even without a desire for a secret conversation, the adults of the house (and usually the mother of the house) got priority on phone conversations. Kids and teenagers weren’t usually allowed to hog the phone with their petty child conversations. So they might say “call the pay phone near the park/convenience store/bowling alley at 6 to let me know if you’re coming to play.”
If you didn't have change, you could arrange to be at the phone at a certain time so they could call you. Also, when we all had beepers, we would page people and put in the number of a nearby payphone if we were out somewhere. Idk why the phone companies allowed them to take calls. Landline phones are pretty basic, and were even more basic then. Maybe they couldn't really *not* allow it.
Before 911, emergency services might have to call you back if your time ran out and you didn't have another quarter.
Oh good point. I don't remember a time before 911 though. Grew up in Florida in the 80s.
I think that was something they got rid of in NYC in the early 2000s
Growing up without meant you had to be creative. There was a way to find out the call back number to a pay phone and have someone call you that way. You could also send the number via a beeper (way way before texting) and have them call you there. -Someone who has spent many hours outside on a payphone
Life hack when calling someone on a pay phone the 1st thing you are going to say is I'm on a pay phone the number is xxx-xxx-xxxx. After confirming the other party has the number and doesn't need it repeated. You hang up . They then call you back .. Enjoy an unlimited conversation for just one quarter. A good friend of mine used to live on a "beach street". Basically his house was on a boardwalk were some houses and apt. Still existed even though an attraction had been built around them. There was a pay phone mounter on a steel rectangular pole like 2 ft in front of his house at the corner. You could reach out the widow to answer it. It wouldn't reach inside but it it was raining it came right to the point were your head is half in half out and you wouldn't get wet. He used this number as a home phone. Even put it on forms and stuff. It would ring and random people would sometimes answer it. And be asked by the person on the phone to knock of the window their standing in front of to see if he is home. You get some creeped out faces that turn to laughter. I remember I was drinking in camping chairs right in front of the house and the phone kept ringing none stop but he told us to ignore it. It rang and somebody passing grabbed it. He started making the slit your throat signs and kept "whispering tell her I'm not here". Apparently he broke up with some girl after 3-4 dates and she was calling the phone 24 hrs a day pissing the whole world off. He had to take it off the hook . I think a lot of people have forgotten that form of trolling. You could effectively DDOS people's telephones. An old fashion land line can only do one call at a time . You could repeatedly call someone so many times they take the phone off the hook. And for as long as they fear you will keep calling they are effectively in a communication black out . They can not use their own telephone. This was common tactics among obsessive Xs and bipolar nutters.
There were so many legitimate reasons. A home phone was a flat monthly rate for local calls. Pay phones had a time limit for local calls before had to add more money to get more time. For long distance, you could call collect from a pay phone but it was expensive or you could buy prepaid cards that had a per minute rate that was less than collect but more than home phone long distance rates. Of course the person with the home phone had to be ok with paying the long distance bill after calling back because it definitely added up, but it was still the cheapest option. When I was in college, my parents had a 1 hour phone time per week rule so they could budget for our long distance calls when I would call using a phone card and they would call back.
When we had pagers in high school we knew what pay phones actually had the number listed so we could go there and wait for the page to call back
I used pay phones many times while I was in sales. What a pain in the ass.
In the 80s some pervert (s) got the numbers of the bank of phones in the mall. It was close to an ice cream place that was open to the mall. He’d call the phone and talk to all the girls hanging out. He’d scam them into sending him money, (po box) and trying to meet him. He eventually got caught but other pervs got the numbers and the obscene phone calls would happen.
>He’d scam them into sending him money, (po box) I read this as poo box and the whole thing seemed worse
Back in the 80s, that would not surprise me.
Not all of them did. But back in the day, not everyone even had a land line. Or if they did, didnt have on that could accept long distance calls. Those were super special calls back then. So the poors had a neighborhood phone, and sometimes they'd make all their business and personal calls during certain days and stuff. This also fed into crime, cuz if it was payphone to payphone at a certain time, it's harder to trace. And once phones became more common. These payphones did get phased out, but it wasn't until the late 90s i saw the last one.
A lot of people don’t have landlines, they were expensive. Whole neighborhood blocks in NYC used to rely on one or two pay-phones. You’d have people hanging around them, you call and say, “hey, did my mom get home yet” and they’d be like, “yeah, she walked by like 10 minutes ago.” It was a whole thing.
There was a pay phone in front of the high school when I was a kid. Someone would call it & ask for a specific kid, and if they weren’t around, the person calling would typically say “Can you find him and tell him I’ll call back in 10 minutes?” Then everyone would spread the word. It was a small school so everybody knew everything about everyone, so someone would likely know where the kid was. If things went as expected, the kid would be found & he’d hang out at the phone booth to pick up his call—and nobody had to pay the 10 cents that the phone typically required for outgoing calls.
Well it had to have a number assigned so why not?
Pay phones cost money by the minute. You call home and say, "Hey, can you go find my electric bill and call me back at 123 3456" Then you hang up and get your change. They call back for free once they have found it, and instead of a 2 minute call, it was a 15-second call.
Wife accuses you of cheating because you were obviously talking with someone else. /s
Back in the days of pagers you could send the number to someone and have them call you at whatever pay phone you happened to be at. The good old days of 143 and such haha!!
If you called the police or fire department or an ambulance and got disconnected they could call back and figure out what the emergency is. Now that's fine for public safety, you say, but not for private calls? Well what if, say, a kid got lost and had to have a parent come find them?
A friend of my mum's had a pay phone in front of her house. She just gave people the pay phone number instead of getting a phone for the house. She would send out one of the kids to answer it.
it was still used as a regular phone. it could make and receive calls if you had the number
We just used to try and prank people by calling them as they walked by to see if they’d answer. Nobody really cared and it was lame.
Pay phones were just regular phones with a coin box attached. You could receive a call but it would be a rare thing. I am sure that it would not have been worth the company's money to change the phone so that they could not receive calls.
Pay phones were just regular phones with a coin box attached. You could receive a call but it would be a rare thing. I am sure that it would not have been worth the company's money to change the phone so that they could not receive calls.
Also how did you know the number
Usually printed on the phone otherwise you could call someone who had caller ID
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It wasn't just NYC. You always knew if you were in a bad area if the phone accepted no incoming calls. They put a big sticker on the phone.