up until the mid-90s, 411 (information ) was free on a payphone then they started charging for them>now on a private phone it was whatever the owner decided to charge
on a landline they were free then they started giving you so many free 411 calls a month and when you ran out it was 35 cents a call and in the mid-00s Verizon (who bought out GTE) would dial the 411 number for you for an extra 45 cents
We switched to cable phone service and 411 calls are about a buck apiece but now you could look up any number on cell or the internet …
There were and still are many differences between the US telephone/telecommunication system and Germany’s. Just two examples:
One from the times of pay phones: usual pay phones were dial out only. You couldn’t make a call to a payphone. One more modern example: getting charged for *incoming *calls or texts on a cell phone is unheard of in Germany.
When did they start putting time limits for local calls? Around here on a Ma Bell/Wisconsin Bell pay phone you could talk forever on a dime (later a quarter) if it was local.
The GTE payphones that we’re in the northern part of the state were weird. You would dial your parties number and when they answered THEN you would insert a dime. You could hear them say “hello” but then nothing more until you deposited money. Which meant you could drive people crazy ringing their phone without it costing the prankster anything.
My brother and I ended up in a trick bag in the middle of nowhere and had to call a friend long distance to come pick us up. Cost over a buck for three minutes and when we went over the operator did indeed ring the pay phone.
One trick I saw in the late 80’s was people getting calls at the payphone. It would not ring but the call still went through. It was a common practice in certain neighborhoods for drug dealers to have someone call them at a predetermined time and they would just pick up the phone and start talking to them for free. I was at a bank of 5 or 6 phones outside of a gas station once and a dubious looking character strongly suggested that I use another phone because he had a call coming in on that one. I used another phone and observed him getting his free call and his marching orders.
I also seem to recall that in the early 80’s the pay phones still rang. I guess they billed the caller for that in both scenarios since like people have mentioned, you just didn’t mess with the phone company.
U. S. wireless companies don’t charge for incoming calls or texts, either. They may have in the past, but this is no longer a practice, especially since companies offer unlimited service.
What we were doing seemed like a good idea until it turned to shit and we were stranded in northeast Wisconsin with no transportation to get home. No taxis or busses and very little money. Trying to hitch in the middle of the night was fruitless.
We found a pay phone outside of a rural tavern we were too young to go inside of (got told to GTFO when we went inside to see if anyone would let us bum a ride 60 miles south). I probably would have been ok there at the time I was 17 and it wasn’t that big of a deal for a minor that age to be in a bar. But my brother was only 12.
No way were we calling our parents. We
Had enough to face when we got home at 4am. Wasn’t going to let them know where we had been or why on top f it.
That was a later change. Certainly when I was a kid, you could call into a payphone. There was a payphone by the public pool and there were many calls for so and so to come home. Some kids would yell ‘Don’t answer that!’ if they were expecting a parental call.
I think they removed the call in-feature to stop drug dealers from using payphones for orders. This had happened by the mid 80s at least. And the way they stopped the call in feature was simply by preventing the pay phone from ringing. At least that’s the way it works on the ones I knew about. If you knew what time the call was coming, you could pick up and receive the call with a little trial and error.
Hmm. Interesting. Guess we all learned something today. Trick bag around here means to find yourself in a bad situation, between a rock and a hard place, etc…
Yep. We grew up across the street from a park that had a pay phone that accepted in coming calls. Our parents never caught on every year that the emergency cards they were signing for school had that phone number on them instead of ours. We filled out the cards and they signed them. Or we would fill them out in pencil and change the number after they signed them.
Then when we ditched school and they would call our “home” the phone would jut ring and ring. Nobody was ever anywhere near that pay phone to answer it. Never got in trouble over it.
Feel free to scold me for shit we pulled over 40 years ago.
I’m only an hour and a half to two south of you, and I’ve never heard this expression, either. Wonder if it’s generational, regional, or a bit of both.
That said, Urbandictionary.com does have an entry for it corresponding to your use.
The free information calls must have definitely varied by location/carrier - I don’t remember ever having free 411 calls with Bell or its successors (although it’s possible that I did once I switched to phone service through my internet provider)
I spent a summer working on a fishing boat in Westport, Washington. I gave my girlfriend the phone number to a pay phone near to where I was staying. For a couple weeks, she would call collect and I would accept. While talking, an operator would interrupt every 3 or 4 minutes and ask me to deposit 25 cents. After a few weeks I came up with a plan to save me some change. When the operator interrupted, we would hang up, then she would call me back 30 seconds later. This worked for 3 weeks. Then Ma Bell decided the pay phone I used could no longer be used to accept collect calls. The stuff hit the fans when my girlfriends parents received their next phone bill. $7.75 worth of collect calls were charged back to them. After that I was plugging quarters into the pay phone so we could talk to each other.
