Don’t most payphones now disallow incoming calls?
What gets me is that they always show some guy saying, “I have to call my girlfriend,” then starts to make a collect call “the wrong way”.
How many schmos out there are going to keep girlfriends when they show that they’re so cheap and/or irresponsible that they can’t pay for a stupid local toll call!?
I had the misfortune of spending a lovely evening in one of Kentucky’s finest drunk tanks (as in, I’ll never drink and drive again!). We had a phone in the cell that would only allow collect calls, but only by dialing “0”. I bet that has them Wayans boys awful angy 
Gilded
Collect calls are very convenient for a student living a few states away from home. How else are you going to tell your parents things such as “the plane was delayed two hours, stay home, don’t pick me up until six.” It’s not worth getting a calling card for the three or four times a year I call from the train station/airport, but it’s sure worth whatever the collect call costs for my parents not to have to sit in an airport for two extra hours.
And no, I can’t use change. Coins are the precious things that give me clean laundry and food from the snack machines. To a college student, sometimes a quarter is worth more than a dollar.
My calling cards always charge me extra for pay-phone calls. Maybe I’m just dumb and buy the wrong cards, I don’t know. But I think if the call is short that collect would be the best way to go for out-of-state calls from a pay phone. Of course, this is not true for whichever collect service it is that charges you 99¢ for 20 minutes…
I’m not sure what they’re teaching in college these days, but in case you missed the lecture you should know that a dollar can get you four (4) of those precious quarters!
I know where Ariadne is coming from, though. You need those quarters for laundry machines - I know I do, and the damn things don’t take anything else, not even those newfangled dollars. And the only change machine, while giving change for dollar bills, will not give change for the newfangled five-dollar bills. So I scrounge for quarters as best I can, and that’s probably why they’re worth more to Ariadne than a dollar (in a sense).
Yeah, I know where you’re coming from, too, since I have to do laundry in a quarter-driven machine. However, whenever I catch myself thinking “oooh, precious quarter, must save for laundry day”, I try to remind myself that I can go to the supermarket and get a whole roll of them for 10 bucks. It ends up costing the same. It really does.
I can do that too… if I have $10.