Dang! I learn something new every day…
The airport I fly out of (CHU - Houston County Airport - a one runway untowered general aviation airport ) has a payphone, and it is listed in the phone book.
Every year we have a fly-in/drive-in breakfast and there is always a call or 2 form someone asking if the breakfast is today and the times, etc.
I was there when some lady was trying to call the airport in Houston, TX.
The county was wondering why they were paying $100/month for the payphone (may not be exat figure), we mentioned reporting crashes, fires etc via 911 which they reluctantly agreed to.
It later turns out that the state reimburses the county for the cost ($ comes from avgas taxes), and the pay phone was costing the county very little.
Brian
Here’s an idea:
You’re on a pay phone and ask the operator to connect a collect call…
…to another pay phone. :dubious:
Who’s gonna collect???
Many years ago, the company I worked for had several pay phones for employee use. One, just outside my office, had a number similar to a local bar. This resulted in several interesting wrong numbers. One series in particular was from an irate woman looking for her husband, who had called repeatedly looking for, let’s call him Joe. I tried explaining that she had the wrong number, that this wasn’t the bar she was looking for and that he wasn’t here. She kept insisting that it was, it was, and he was. Finally I partially muffled the phone with my hand, and said “Joe, it’s her again.” Then said to her “he says he isn’t here” and hung up. She never called back again.
When I was in high school, I discovered that a certain pay phone on my way home from school was somehow able to connect to 976 numbers without putting any money in. (For those who aren’t familiar, 976 numbers are those pay-by-the-minute phone services.)
I’m keeping my mouth shut on which 976 numbers I actually dialed. 
There are legitimate reasons to call a payphone that don’t involve drug deals:
“Hi, sweetheart, it’s daddy. Could you put your mother on the phone? Oh. Well, when she gets back, could you tell her that my car broke down, I just used my last two quarters on this pay phone, and would she please call me at 555-8462?”
I used to be a delivery driver and relied heavily on pay phones to keep in touch with my dispatcher. One guy I worked with waited nearly an hour for a return call at a payphone from the boss, until I pointed out the small sign that said “No Incoming Calls.” Boy, was he pissed!
A friend and I were once into a vast array of phone mischief, pranks, and general social engineering back in the late '80s. We tried they pay-phone-to-pay-phone thing many times just to see if it would work. Most of the time the operator would inform us that the phone we were trying to call was another pay phone and wouldn’t connect us. We did manage to pull off a collect call one time. It was no big thing, really, as it was a local call to another pay phone just a few hundred feet away. After we found out it could be done, we dropped it in favor of other ventures.
In high school (late 80’s), we had a bank of three payphones by the parking lot. I had the fabulous idea one day of calling the operator and asking for a collect call to the phone number of one of the other phones. It worked! We accepted the collect call. However, we generally didn’t have much to say once connected, given that we were just standing there next to each other with people looking at us.
I should have tried also answering the other to see if the operator would recognize that the same person who was logging the call was answering the call.
Several months later the operator informed me that that phone does not accept collect calls.
You sure he wasn’t talking about this?
Okay, I know I’m gonna open up a big can worms here, but in the interest of fighting ignorance, I’ll take a chance. Back in the seventies, there used be a whole underground culture built around “phone spoofing.” Most of the time, it entailed using a device called (IIRC) a “blue box” that somehow bypassed the coin requirement to operate a pay phone. I think it worked on a tone generation principle. I believe all pay phones have been modified to prevent the use of a “blue box,” but maybe there are some really old pay phones out there that are still vulnerable. Does anyone else remember what I am talking about?
Whoa! Now that is weird! Look at the times of those two posts (arnex and me) - we were writing about the same subject at the same time! Are you folks sure you don’t believe in synchronicity?
I was a big prank caller in my youth. Calling pay phones was a favorite activity. There was a pay phone across a walkway from my dorm room in college and we’d have no end of fun with it. We could watch people’s reactions through my barely opened curtains.
The whole pay phone/drug dealer thing was a much worse problem than you may realize. Big bad-ass drug dealers would claim a particular phone as their own and no one else would be allowed to use them. They didn’t give a shit if your car broke down and you needed to call for a tow truck, you were not going to be allowed to use their “office.”
Haj
I worked a summer on a charter fishing boat at Westport, Washington. When I wanted to talk to someone at home in Tacoma, I would call collect and whoever answered the phone would not accept the call. A minute later the pay phone I called from would ring and the operator (this was 1973) would ask me if I wanted to accept a collect call. I would accept and talk to my mom and siblings, sometimes for over an hour. A month after returning home my mom received a phone bill for over $300 for the collect calls to Westport. I remember my mom telling someone at the phone company to stick the bill up their ass and a few weeks later our home phone was shut off. My mom talked to a lawyer and a couple days later the phone was back on. She never did have to pay the bill.
Back in the 70s, my sister and an out-of-town cousin used to do this very thing. Sister would make a collect call from her high school payphone at a prearranged time to Cousin at a payphone at her high school. Several times.
The phone company has people on staff who root out crimes like this, and it took one all of five minutes to call my sister’s high school, ask the office if they have any students with my sister’s highly unusual first name (She had a bit of a rep in the front office), and get contact information for my parents, who were extremely displeased with this whole thing. My sister and cousin started writing letters instead.
Once, as I was walking down the street in Poplar Bluff, MO, I heard a pay phone ringing. I picked it up and a masculine voice asked:
“Would you like a blowjob?”
I said “No, thanks, I already had lunch”, hung up, and went on my merry way.
Phreaks are to phones as Hackers are to computers. You can tell you’re in a bad neighborhood when the payphones won’t take incoming calls. You can tell you are in a REALLY bad neighborhood when the payphones won’t take cash.
In uptown in Chicago A LOT of the payphones will only take credit card, 800 (or other toll free) and collect or third billing calls.
Pretty soon will cell phones the payphone will be no more.
Some pay phones don’t take cash?! :eek:
I don’t know about “blue boxes”, but in the early nineties, there existed mini-tape recorders that would play the tones. Hold the recorder to the mouthpiece; press the button. It worked like a charm for long-distance calls.
In summer 2000, my husband was without a home phone for several weeks, and would walk to the nearest pay phone–only to find the same person always on it, rattling off a list of numbers. Clearly some sort of bookie and some sort of numbers racket. Sometimes the person would just be hanging around, and would get a little agitated as my husband made his call-- giving every indication that she was waiting for a call.
Pay phones are the more sophisticated of the vending devices. They have up to fifty alarms and will call the home office to report trouble, from a full coin box to quarter dropped but no call made. They can also be polled for status. In order to do this they cannot be set to ring for an incomming call. The phone can be set for the times for incoming calls and the times for answering with an internal modem.
This was not always the case. Before computers and modems the payphones were just phones that required money to operate. Many businesses would use a payphone in lieu of the expensive business phone line. So the ability to accept incoming calls was needed.
But as the pay phones became more sophisticated in reporting when there is trouble with the phone, as the cost of business phone lines went down, as the demand for street corner phones to not accept incomming calls, the operators of the pay phones just set the phone to always answer with the modem instead of ring.
By the way, the pay phone to pay phone collect call required ignorance on the part of the operator as once upon a time pay phones had (nnn) nnn-9nnn numbers.