When growing up decades ago, distance phone calls could be surprisingly expensive. So much so, they were often reserved for inconvenient times late on a weekend when they would qualify for a sizeable discount up to sixty percent.
As kids, we used to signal our parents to come get us from the whatever by calling collect from a public phone and leaving a garbled half-second message. We can’t have been the only ones to do this. Probably every kid did back then? But I’ve never asked my contemporaries and don’t see a previous thread on this (which is no guarantee there aren’t ten of them…)
The idea (back then) was that you compiled a list of names for yourself that are codes for things, e.g.:
Steve: Pick me up at school.
John: Pick me up at the gym.
Robert: I found a ride, and I’ll be home soon.
David: I am going to my friend David’s house. I’ll call you later.
Michael: I am going to my friend Michael’s house. I’ll call you later.
So if I want my parents to pick me up from the gym, I’ll go to a payphone and dial the operator. I’ll tell the operator my name is John, and that I’d like to make a collect phone call to 937-555-1212 (my parents’ phone). When my mother answers the phone the operator tells her, “Collect call from John. Do you accept the charges?” She will reply, “No,” and hangs up. She then picks me up at the gym.
I was confused at first, because the OP was talking about two separate kinds of calls. It started out talking about long distance calls. But why would you call your parents long distance to come and get you? At least, regularly enough that they would know to, and be willing to, make an out-of-town drive based on just a half-second message?
Not precisely by the method described in the OP, but…
When I was a freshman in college, long distance calls were still expensive, especially on a student budget. My girlfriend, who was living back in Green Bay, worked in a small office, and the best time for us to talk was often early in the morning.
She’d go in to her office early, which ensured that she was the only person there. At precisely 7am, I’d call the office’s main number, let it ring twice, and then hang up, to let her know I was awake and ready to talk; she’d then call me back, at my dorm room, using the office phone.
Why would I call my parents collect to pick me up from somewhere or let them know where I was? It must have been local - they weren’t going to make a 4 hour round trip because I said “Steve”. It would have cost a dime when I was a kid and later on it would have been a quarter - and if I was going to a friends house, I would have just called from there. What did happen was that if someone was traveling far away, they’d call collect to let us know they arrived and we would refuse the charges.
Long distance calls do differ from local calls with reversed payment, but are similar enough for the purposes of this thread. In Canada both allowed one to leave a brief message, sometimes with operator involvement, which the involved companies obviously knew about. As a younger student I used the latter and as an older student I was poor enough to use the former.
We had a couple short codes but we weren’t clever enough to use alliteration.
In my experience at least, collect calls were inherently long distance calls, even if you were calling someone local. They would still wind up having to pay the long distance rates, since it went over that network.
And I believe collect calls (and maybe toll free calls) were the only ones you could make from a payphone without putting in money.
Aka “Cap’n Crunch”. Early hackers discovered that a whistle, supplied in boxes of cereal, provided the precise kiloherz tone to signal the exchange, and thus make free long distance phone calls from anywhere, usually a pay phone.
There’s an old Dragnet episode where Joe Friday needs to call someone in Utah or someplace like that from Los Angeles, it takes a couple minutes to route through all the different operators along the way before the phone starts ringing on the other end.
Not quite what is being asked here, but in the same neighborhood.
I recall that when I was a young, single guy living on my own (late seventies to early eighties), for some portion of that time I had a telephone plan that charged me by the minute for outgoing calls but not for for incoming calls. A flat-rate plan was available, but the by-the-minute-for-outgoing plan was better if you didn’t spend much time on outoging calls.
So, with the outgoing by-the-minute plan, if I wanted to call a friend and ask if he was going to Plootz’s Tavern Friday night, I’d expect that to be only a couple of minutes tops, and who cares? But if I wanted to chat for some open-ended amount of time, I’d call them and say, “Call me back.” Admittedly, this wouldn’t be impressive for a dating partner in general (and I wouldn’t do it the first time I called her under any circumstnaces), but anyone I would have wanted to date on an ongoing basis would have understood and gone along with it unless it conflicted with her own plan. (Then I’d eat the charges.)
When I was a kid, my mom had a friend who didn’t pay her phone bill (I assume) so her calling was restricted in some way. She would call our house and let it ring twice, then hang up. My mom would then call her back.
The woman lived only a mile or so away, yet the way phone calling was set up, she was long distance!
The same year in which I was doing the “ring twice” thing with my girlfriend in her office (in post #7), I had a friend in my dorm whose girlfriend was doing a semester abroad in France.
The two of them abused a pay phone, by having her make a collect call, from France, to the pay phone located in the lobby of the dorm cafeteria. He’d be there, waiting at the pay phone at a designated time, and when it rang, he’d pick up, and tell the French operator that he would accept the charges.
It clearly worked, because they pulled this off all semester; my guess is that part of why it did work was that the French operator on the girlfriend’s end had no way to know that the number to which she was routing the call was a pay phone.
For a while in the 90’s I would make regular trips to a transit station near a friend’s house. I would use the auto collect call, leaving the message “Viking”. This was our pre arranged signal for ‘Pick Doc up at the station.’