rotary phone help?

Factual Questions
41

I might as well relate a CSB (Cool Story Bro) here that I had as a Services Tech in Palm Beach, Florida concerning an old rotary phone. I was dispatched to a home on the island of Palm Beach. For those of you who might not be familiar, it is a very wealthy area. The customer was out of service and I diagnosed a short inside the home. To fix this I needed to find out what was causing the short, usually a wire missing the insulation, corrosion in a jack or a defective piece of equipment (telephone, fax or answering machine)

The home was HUGE … a mansion really. This place must have cost at least 5 million or more. So, I am going room to room checking all the jacks and equipment, but I can’t locate the source of the short. I finally narrowed the trouble down to one room. It had to be in there but the older (probably 70+) lady refused to let me in the room. Finally after about a 1/2 hour I told her that I had done all I could, I was positive that the short was in the secret room and if she wouldn’t let me in there was nothing I could do and she would remain out of service.

She finally agreed and sheepishly opened the room where I discover an old rotary phone that ended up being defective and causing the problem. I removed the phone and the service came back on. Curious, I asked the lady why she didn’t want me to go into the room. She told me that she knew AT&T (long gone at that point, we were BellSouth at the time) charged for each phone you had in the house. They did at one time, as you leased phones from AT&T as you couldn’t purchase them on the open market. If I remember correctly it was something like .75 cents a month per phone or something. Didn’t matter since that practice was ended probably 10 or 15 years prior.

So, here was this lady living in a 5 million dollar home scared to let me into a room for fear I discover her old rotary phone and alert the company so they can charge her $8 or so a year. I found that quite hilarious when it happened and still do today.

42

You laugh.

I want one of these. Yes, it’s a refurbished Model 500 Rotary Desk Phone with a built-in cellular module and battery. :slight_smile:

Edit: bother. Just saw the other post upthread.

43

Drop the price in half and make it that cool greenish-blue color like the one the Drapers have in Mad Men, and I am SO buying one.

Relevant pic I snapped at a county fair in Vancouver, Washington last summer.

44

While we’re at it, the longer time to dial higher numbers and zeroes was the reason for the way the original area codes were assigned. Originally, all area codes had a 1 or 0 in the second digit, and any digit but those in the first and third. This makes 212 the easiest-to-dial valid area code, and so that was given to New York City, on the assumption that NYC would be the most-called area code. The next-easiest are 213 and 312, and those went to Los Angeles and Chicago, and so on.

45

Impress your friends! You still can with a wired touch tone having a hangup button.

In the olden days, I made useless calls on retail-establishment phones that didn’t have dials in order to prevent the great unwashed from using them.

What a rebel.

46

Just downloaded one of many free “rotary phone dialers” for my Verizon Droid X2 smartphone.

Amusing. Made a call. Now will delete. :smiley:

47

I don’t want a cartoon of a rotary dial, I want a real live rotary dial.