[Aside - Didn't realize it'd been so long since I'd posted! Gee, it's been busy around here ... but I'm not really sure what's actually been accomplished. *chuckle*]
Read in the paper today that Ma Bell is eliminating pay phone service. Cellphones and other technology have apparently chopped into the profits significantly, so it's time to ditch the critters and move on.
True, people are constantly yakking on their ubiquitous handy-dandy cells, or wandering around talking to the air while their bluetooth gizmos funnel the conversation directly to their brains without hand or mouth being involved. Shoot! I have a cellphone. Used the darn thing as my main phone for two years while my house was getting fixed. It eliminated a lot of problems concerning changing my main phone number on the bazillion things I would have had to change it on.
Still ... I can't help but think that getting rid of pay phones completely is not such a good idea at this point. There continue to be way too many places where cellphone coverage just plain drops off the map, literally, even places where my skewed logic says the stupid thing still oughta work. I still have a "dead spot" near Baytown when I head to Houston. It's shorter than it used to be, but Hey! Shouldn't the flat land between Beaumont and Houston carry those signals further than if they had mountains or hills to snake around, over, and through?
Unfortunately, I do see Ma Bell's point. I wonder how much gets spent repairing vandalized phones. *sigh* Don't people realize that sometimes those pay phones are a lifeline for someone in a difficult or dangerous situation? There continues to be a public service need for this "antiquated" equipment. I'll have to admit, though, that I'm rarely caught with the two quarters it now costs to call anyone on the old landlines, even though I am Luddite enough to insist upon having a landline in my home. There are, occasionally, advantages to using older technology.
Still, I wonder what our future youth will say when they encounter old comics of Superman changing into his Supersuit in a phone booth. Though I always thought that was a dumb place to change clothes even before phone booths turned into three-sided half-boxes.
Ah...I think we've about reached the end of an era.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I still chuckle when I think of my 1987-model daughter going by herself to a payphone in a restaurant where we were supposed to meet her grandparents. She was going to call them (on their cell phone--a behemoth thing in a "bag") to see how far away they were from where we were to meet. She came back after a few minutes and said she didn't know how to use the payphone. She was about 9 years old at the time and knew perfectly well how to use a telephone, so I was really quite puzzled about it, as I went with her over to the payphone.
It had a rotary dial on it.
Oh, that's a hoot!
The house where I lived for a year still had a rotary phone in it. It was the only phone that worked whenever the power went out.
Post a Comment