I work with software that cares about phones and it has some legacy code to account for someone dialing 10-10 XXX. The person I was speaking to hardly understood paying for long distance let alone billing other long distance companies for your call or collect calls since that came up too.
My family did that too and I know others did as well. We had a couple of different ring codes. One was the single ring as you described. There were a couple of more that I don’t remember that well but they were basically a single ring followed by a hangup, a pause, and then a certain number of rings after that that signified things like yes or no to a predetermined question. The first single ring meant that no one was supposed to answer but just listen for the second ring(s). It was like primitive Morse code.
I am not all that old but I don’t think youngsters today really understand how expensive long-distance calls and phone service in general was back then. The average home phone bill was close to an iPhone contract today except you had to pay for it in 70’s and 80’s dollars and that was just for phone calls because we didn’t have the web, let alone Netflix. However, it could be much more than that especially if you talked a lot more long-distance and doubly so if you needed to call overseas.
Some of the rates could be the better part of a dollar a minute and even much more to foreign countries. We thought is was a miracle when it came down to about 10 cents a minute for most domestic calls in the late 80’s. Don’t even get me started on 1-900 numbers that advertised all over the place and could bankrupt a millionaire if you used them much because they charged more than the minimum wage PER MINUTE.
I graduated college in 1995 and students (especially freshman girls) were still getting reprimanded by their parents for running up hundreds of dollars of phone bills the first month because they wanted to talk to their home-town friends and long-distance boyfriends. I got nailed in 1996 when I called my then girlfriend in Italy for a grand total of 11 minutes. The charge was right at $50. I am not even sure how you could make a phone call that expensive today and that change was very rapid in the late 1990’s.
I complain about the price of things today just like everyone else but phone service is one area where things are cheaper today than they ever have been. I run my landline through a very small internet box and it literally costs $0 to call anywhere in the U.S. and Canada and a trivial amount (usually fractions of a cent a minute) anywhere else in the world. You can’t go much lower than that unless they start paying me to call people.
Ahhh…makes sense. I wonder what that is like from inside their brain.
I’m 40, and while I remember the commercials, all I really remember about long distance phone calls is that they were really expensive compared to local calls; like **Cardigan’s **family, our great grandmother would ask our parents to call and let the phone ring after we drove home 2 hours from visiting her. Even this much probably wouldn’t have stuck in my mind if we weren’t billed for them in college in the mid-to-late 90s. If she’s still crying over them, I wonder if she’s watching vintage ads?
“Bob Wehadababyitsaboy” - that’s from 1999.
Yeah, it’s weird, because she usually makes a point (sometimes to my irritation) about sort of underlining her differences from even slightly older generations (mocking people who call you instead of texting, or who get Netflix discs by mail instead of just streaming).
LOL! Not even a phone company commercial, but yup: that’s kind of what I always thought of my mom’s tricks, that they were cheating the phone company (and it’s not like she tries to scam people or shoot angles in any other way I can think of).
In my location, thanks to the way phone “zones” (for the lack of a better word) were set up, even back in the 1990s and 2000s, there were relatives that lived literally less than 5 miles away that counted as “long-distance” calls unless you paid an extra monthly fee for an “area +” plan.
Ah yes, the dreaded “local long distance.” Those calls were more than twice as expensive as out-of-area long distance!
Fun fact: 10-10-321 and similar interexchange services still exist, although they no longer advertise and are dreadfully expensive (30¢/min.!) They also don’t work on most wireless carriers.
“Rea-ach out–reach out and touch someone…”