Roadside discovery offers dial back to the days of pay phones

During one of my recent morning walks, I unearthed a relic from the not-so-recent past. It wasn’t some ancient archaeological discovery, though. The dustcovered and weather-beaten equipment lay abandoned on the roadside. As I got closer to the ET-like object (it has a large, pearlshaped cover), I realized it was a pay phone.

The telephone, sheltered by a red helmet-like protective cover made of fiberglass, had perhaps been dead for a long time. For confirmation, I lifted the black-colored receiver hanging on its rest and kept it to my ear. No dial tone. Perhaps, it was permanently on sleep mode.

The boxlike telephone, fixed to two parallel metal staffs on the sidewalk, with a yellow-colored “dashboard”, an LCD screen and silver-colored push buttons, and a handset with a receiver and mouthpiece, brought back some nostalgia, from days when the cellphone was unheard of, or it was just making inroads into our lives.

It was the era when a phone only meant a landline, be it a home phone or the public phone. Homes had telephones with a dialing disc or buttons at the center. One just dialed, or pressed, the numbers to make calls. But I must say they were far more convenient than typing numbers on our small cellphone touch screens — one faulty touch and you’ll have to press the backspace.

Public phones dotted most streets in cities around the world. Users just had to lift the receiver off the hook and call the number to get in touch with friends or family. Calls were chargeable, and tariffs depended on whether they were local or international. Local calls were cheaper as against overseas calls. Unlike the cellphones that allow you to make calls to anywhere in the world at very low rates, thanks to technology.

Making calls was quite a hassle on the pay phones. To make a call within the city, the caller would type the city code followed by the phone number, and for an international call, one would dial the international standard dialing code followed by the city code and then the number. If you typed the wrong code or number, you repeated the process all over again. Not sure about the dialing procedure on the phone I stumbled upon, though.

The pay phone also came with a slot for using a calling card that gave a certain amount of talk time. Each time a call was made, the amount would get deducted from it. A contrast to the present-day postpaid connections that allow “unlimited” talk time.

In my home country, India, we had coin phones in every city that allowed you to make only local calls. Each call, which cost 1 rupee (1.4 cents), allowed a talk time of three minutes, after which the call would get cut, unless you dropped another coin into the slot provided for it.

Public phones also bring to mind the public telephone booths in India, where one could talk without the fear of calls getting cut after every 3 minutes. And a local call cost 2 rupees.

Unlike the ubiquitous coin phones that were kept in the open, these booths were located either inside a shop or a commercial complex. Here, one could make both local and international calls. After every call, a device tracking the talk time would generate the bill for the customer.

The experiences at these booths certainly make for interesting reading. In areas where there were fewer booths, one would see long lines of people. Those spending a longer time inside the booths would get shouted at by those waiting, while those at the receiving end would come up with all kinds of excuses to escape people’s wrath.