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Coinkidinkally enough, somebody on Facebook just posted this photo:
To which I replied: Good luck finding a pay phone at all, much less one you can make a call on for a ♪.
I speak from recent experience here. I only had three appointments today, all in town, and none especially taxing; hell, one was a festive office lunch. But the morning wound up more stressful than expected because, once again, I managed to misplace my gorram mobile phone, and drained the battery in so doing, preventing a quick find by either calling it or Find-my-Phoning it.
No matter, I thought; it's good to cut the cord once in awhile, and it'd be off for the appointments and the lunch anyway, so I went from A to B expecting to finish up at C all within a couple of hours....
Except the guy meeting me at B was a no-show. I'd be SOL if he emailed me (he did, it turned out later, but only minutes before I gave up and left), but if he'd left a voicemail I could retrieve it by calling my number.
Hmmmmm. There used to be a way to do this. But in the years- and it's been years- since I've needed to drop a quarter for a phone call, the portals for doing so have all but disappeared.
Fortunately, finally, on one lonely wall outside the foreclosure alcove of Erie County Hall, was a single pay phone. Fifty cents for two minutes- which was really $1.90 for the job, since it also required change and the only quick way to get that was to buy a buck-forty water bottle from the vending machine across the alcove. (I wonder when an app will eventually take THOSE away from us.)
Also fortunately, it gave me my call- lots of beep-boops beyond my seven dialed digits, as if it had to uplink to a satellite or something to get into the phone grid- followed by a new voicemail, not from B (I gave up on him moments later) but from somebody else about something else.
I was phoneless no more before going to Point C- a quick stop home revealed it to be hiding in my gym bag- but it still served as a sad reminder of how quickly technology turns, and turns away.
To which I replied: Good luck finding a pay phone at all, much less one you can make a call on for a ♪.
I speak from recent experience here. I only had three appointments today, all in town, and none especially taxing; hell, one was a festive office lunch. But the morning wound up more stressful than expected because, once again, I managed to misplace my gorram mobile phone, and drained the battery in so doing, preventing a quick find by either calling it or Find-my-Phoning it.
No matter, I thought; it's good to cut the cord once in awhile, and it'd be off for the appointments and the lunch anyway, so I went from A to B expecting to finish up at C all within a couple of hours....
Except the guy meeting me at B was a no-show. I'd be SOL if he emailed me (he did, it turned out later, but only minutes before I gave up and left), but if he'd left a voicemail I could retrieve it by calling my number.
Hmmmmm. There used to be a way to do this. But in the years- and it's been years- since I've needed to drop a quarter for a phone call, the portals for doing so have all but disappeared.
Fortunately, finally, on one lonely wall outside the foreclosure alcove of Erie County Hall, was a single pay phone. Fifty cents for two minutes- which was really $1.90 for the job, since it also required change and the only quick way to get that was to buy a buck-forty water bottle from the vending machine across the alcove. (I wonder when an app will eventually take THOSE away from us.)
Also fortunately, it gave me my call- lots of beep-boops beyond my seven dialed digits, as if it had to uplink to a satellite or something to get into the phone grid- followed by a new voicemail, not from B (I gave up on him moments later) but from somebody else about something else.
I was phoneless no more before going to Point C- a quick stop home revealed it to be hiding in my gym bag- but it still served as a sad reminder of how quickly technology turns, and turns away.