There's a single payphone still standing at the end of the road in the town nearest me. It was disconnected when I found it, but I got phreaky and hooked it back up + bypassed the coin mechanism. Mostly out of nostalgia, partly for the love of fixin' stuff :)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Someone having an otherwise really bad day is going to send your soul to the Good Place
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There was a bank of five or six payphones in the common area at my high school. Someone found out there was a number you could call which, after you hung up would immediately generate a callback to the phone it was called from. It was not uncommon to have all the phones ringing constantly.
We had a deaf school in our high school, so one of the payphones had a keyboard and an operator would read your messages to the other party. My friend used to use it to call his friend and see how many dirty words he could get the operator to say.
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My high school only had one pay phone. It had a bad connection in the hand set, so sound cut in and out constantly. People rarely ever bothered making calls on it. The coin return also had some sort of obstruction inside it. If you inserted a quarter and then hit the coin return lever, you'd hear it fall, but it didn't actually come out. When enough quarters built up though, they would all flood out into return tray at once. Naturally, it got used as a slot machine. Drop in a quarter, pull the tiny lever, and see if you hit the jackpot.
I know this would be annoying as heck, but I’m laughing my ass off imagining this.
I would totally have done this too.
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Is it rage bait or are the some of the younger ones really that stupid?
They literally do not exist at all in many places. Why wouldnt you question their existence? Sure its easy to figure out whether they were real, but people on social media constantly ask questions without doing any research for themselves.
I’ve never seen a gramophone or telegraph in my life but I know they’re real things
Nope. God put those in old photographs to test our faith
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Some people never grow into object permanence or conspiracy theory media beats it out of them. Moon landing? I didn’t see it happen, therefore it didn’t happen. Pay phones? Helen Keller? Spherical Earth? Vaccinations? Dinosaurs? I’ve not directly observed them, thus they must be wholly fake.
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Reality itself is rage bait.
'PC LOAD LETTER'? The fuck does that mean?!
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I remember trying to find quarters to call my mom to come pick me up.
We had an automated reverse charges number we'd call from the payphone. You got to say your name and the system would then call my parents at home and ask "Do you accept a reverse charge call from 'mumimatthestation'?"
Then my mum would hang up and come get me from the station.
Yep! A friend would occasionally walk to the nearest payphone, initiate a collect call, and when it asked for a name he would state the payphone number (we didn't have caller id). He'd hang up and I could call the payphone and we would make our plans.
Where I live, not only do they still exist, but they're also free to use and occasionally also offer free wifi. Why? No idea tbh, my guess is the government contract probably required the provider to keep them working for a certain amount of time.