Moderately Confused by Jeff Stahler for November 10, 2023

Rings a bell.

Ok back in my day you had to put money into a phone to make a phone call when you traveled .

We actually had a cord on our phone, and you couldn’t just walk around the neighborhood with it and annoy anybody within hearing distance!

We had rotary phones. Mess up, and you have to start over.

How would one rewrite the story of Superman? Without a phone booth to change from Clark Kent into the Man of Steel, where could he go to change? A bar? A sewer? Someone tell me.

In the tv series from the fifties, George Reeves left the scene , taking off his hat and tugging at his tie and would go running into a handy alley or if at work, a storage room at the Daily Planet

Simple, easy to use, easy to fix, easy on the ears. Pushbutton dial slightly easier than rotary dial, did not control one’s life or interrupt a meal with a friend. What’s not to like.

Yup, and as a kid, I would go around checking to see if people had forgotten their change. It was my version of a “collect call”!

I started in the wireless industry in 1986. Market penetration was 2% back then.

It started as ten cents a call and was up to two dollars a call when they pulled them all out. Bell claimed “outdated technology”. I was expecting to see a credit card machine attached to the phone.

we answered every call that came in on a rotary phone and didn’t worry about scammers and telemarketers

Our town got its first rotary system in the late 1950s. Before that, you answered the operator’s “Number, please?” with a three digit number(there were fewer than 1000 phones in our town. Long distance calls required you wait for the operator to contact another operator in the town you were calling.

You could talk on the street and people on the phone could hear you without shouting. They had these glass booths which were nearly soundproof. Nobody passing by asked if you were shouting at them.

The best part was anonymously calling people to ask if their refrigerator was running and/or if the drugstore had Prince Albert in the can.

saw a funny video of two teenagers trying to figure out how to make a call on a rotary phone…they couldn’t do it

One good thing about those days, you didn’t lose your phone.

We had a special ruler that did math calculations! I was on my way to a friends house, needed directions and panicked when I couldn’t find my cell phone. Where e can you find a public phone today?