I had made a long-distance call on a pay phone in the 1980s (in the U.S.) In the last couple minutes of the call, a recording came on maybe twice a minute that said “Please deposit 50 cents.” We just ignored it and said our goodbyes and hung up.
Then the pay phone rang. I let it ring a while and picked up. It was the operator, asking for more money. I said sorry, I was just passing by, it wasn’t me who made the call. She said, do you see the person who just used the phone? I said sorry, he just turned the corner. At that point the operator gave up.
I remember this because I was just as curious as you (and Seinfeld) as to how the phone company would handle this situation.
I remember the operator interrupting the conversation saying something like “Your time is up, please deposit another $$ for another (?) minutes”.
I don’t remember any callbacks.
If you stayed on longer than you paid for and the phone company never got their money, though, I think they wouldn’t have worried much – their marginal cost should be zero. I imagine they only worry about establishing the precedent that time never runs out even if you don’t pay.
I seem to remember that you would get the warning that you needed to deposit more money, but if you didn’t pay the call would just cut off. I don’t remember the “honor system” method from that Seinfeld episode.
I also remember carrying around a small tone generator that coupled to the mouthpiece of the handset. I believe I used it to enable touch tone features on pulse phones.
And the 958 echo was pretty cool. In the days before cellphones, I would frequently need to give out a callback number when I was working on a client job site. And I didn’t always know that number. If I picked up the phone and dialed 958, I would hear a recording reciting the number of the line I was on.
For some time in the 80s, small battery powered dialers were a thing. You’d program commonly dialed numbers into the doodad and then you’d hold the dialer up to the microphone in the receiver, hit a button and it would generate the touch tones needed to dial that number. I never saw the appeal but Radio Shack must have sold a bunch of them because there were all kinds of permutations with extra memory, sparkly cases, etc.
Connecting this to the red box used for payphone fraud: Radio Shack sold one particular model that could be modified to generate the red box tones instead of touch tones by swapping out one component (a crystal I believe). I always suspected that design wasn’t accidental since that dialer went on to be a huge hit at Radio Shack. To the point to where I had to order one and wait a few weeks instead of buying one off the shelf. Of course, I was only using it as a dialer. I would never dream of using it in fraudulent ways.
The phone company cared. Just not about you. They cared about profit, and appeasing the regulators, and., believe it or not, about the health of the network.
I went to a meeting with a bunch of people who used to work in the part of AT&T supplying businesses, and what they did to their customers in the monopoly days (because of policy) was a lot worse than what AT&T did to payphone customers.
I was home once when the operator called. Apparently, my sister was with her friend who had called her boyfriend. The friend must have done talked past the limit and the boyfriend gave our number.
My mother was gone and after determining that she was dealing with a kid, the operator gave up.
Ma Bell protected its network like a mother bear protected her cubs; concessions had to be wrested from it, one Federal case at a time. Hush-A-Phone Corp. v. United States established in 1956 that you could legally use a machine to make sounds into an (unmodified!) telephone handset and capture sounds from said handset. No electrical connection, merely close enough physical proximity to allow effective sound management. For everyone who isn’t a phone phreak: Back then, AT&T owned the telephones. All the telephones. You merely leased, and you couldn’t hack up Ma Bell’s property.
After that, it took until 1968 for the Carterfone decision to come down, which allowed people to electrically connect non-AT&T devices to AT&T’s phone lines. You could now plug an answering machine, say, into a phone line, and nobody could stop you. When this failed to make the phone system spontaneously combust or summon forth gremlins from the vasty deep, I’m sure Earnestine was suitably chastened.
Please keep in mind that there were some non-AT&T phone companies out there. We had GTE where we were as a kid. Many got bought out in the 80s and 90s. One that more-or-less survived was Rochester Telephone Corporation which eventually became Frontier, got caught up in the Global Crossing mess, which then renamed itself back to Frontier.
Yep, same here. Don’t remember anything about operator calling back, either.
We never had any of these payphone tricks like calling collect or letting the phone ring twice, hang up, ring twice, etc., growing up. If for some reason I needed to call my parents, if I didn’t have a quarter, I just asked someone for a quarter and they’d give it to me. (I’ve never had someone not give me a quarter as a kid when I said I needed to call my mom.) Then we discovered we could do this, and just use that quarter at the arcade … (No, no. Thus did not begin my life as a con artist. I did this no more than two or three times before realizing that it wasn’t ethically sound.)
That said, I do remember there being some sort of weird trick with BT (British Telecom) phones in the mid-90s where I was able to call overseas without getting charged. For the life of me, I can’t remember what the trick was, but I do seem to remember BT phones took some type of phone card back then (1996) not just coins.
This is how I used to get my mom to come and pick me up from the bus stop after school. I’d call home on the nearby pay phone, let it ring once or twice, then hang up and get my money back. Sometimes, if mom forgot to wait a couple rings before answering the phone, I could blurt out a quick “Pickmeup!” before hanging up and still get my money back.
Another example; Southern New England Telephone, in Connecticut, which was founded in 1878 as the first telephone exchange (predating AT&T). In 1998, SBC bought SNET and then bought AT&T. And then in 2014, Frontier bought SNET from AT&T.
I just saw a demonstration of this at a telephone museum yesterday. The operator would know how much money you’d deposited by listening to the bings and bongs.
That pretty much matches what I remember from late 80s/early 90s Germany. Certainly you would never talk to an operator; the whole idea of operators was so alien to me that it took me a while to figure out what American films talk about when they mention them. Sure, you could ring the information desk, but that came at a hefty fee and was meant to tell you numbers, not put you through to them (I think they would have put you through to the desired number if you had asked for it, but that would have been more expensive than hanging up and then dialling the number the information desk had given you).
As for payphones, I vaguely remember that you’d get signal tones before your time expired, giving you a chance to deposit more coins or else your call would be disconnected. That’s at least what I suspected at the time would happen; I’m not sure it ever actually happened to me.
Oh, I had that happen to me often. If you’d put in a new coin just a second too late, the call was ruthlessly cut. And like you confirmed, no operator to intervene.
I never quite understood why foreign phone companies did this. Didn’t they realize that you wanted those numbers so you could make phone calls to them, thus increasing their income?
Back then, the Bell System operator would cheerfully give you numbers for anyone – even linking in an operator from a different state if needed to get the number. I once had to call people for a relative’s 100th Birthday – I had a list of about 15-20 people, scattered across 3 states. The Bell operator stayed on the phone with me for several minutes getting numbers for all those people, all at no cost to me. Until I proceeded to call all of them; those calls added to their profit.