Originally published at: Fantastically surreal TikTok films about pay telephones | Boing Boing
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Ok, this guy is weird - and funny. Especially as perhaps half the world now has no idea what on earth a payphone is (well, in the ‘West’, at least).
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Wonderful!
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This is the kind of stuff that makes me excited about specific video hosting services (like TikTok) - this kind of short-form, thematically-coherent material doesn’t have any other context in which it can exist and make sense in the same way.
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Pure genius.
There was a site that listed out the numbers of pay phones that were still in service in the USA, a lot were in remote places like national parks, or gas stations in the middle of the desert.
I used to enjoy calling them to see who would pick up, but mostly nobody ever picked up.
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Truly wonderful things. And I didn’t even see him do the directories.
OT: Do I have to have a tiktok account to see tiktok videos? These aren’t playing for me.
Damned Millennials are too scared to talk on the phone.
Worked for me without one. Might be some ad- or script blocking you’re doing?
I know it’s part of the bit but the number of millennials on Tik Tok is probably rather small.
Possibly because they’re in remote places like national parks or gas stations in the middle of the desert.
Having said that, I’d pick up if I came across a ringing payphone in the middle of nowhere. That’s so cool.
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There was a convention in our village that if the phone was ringing you answered it and fetched the person was being called. It was a really small village.
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That’s how the pay phone at the end of the hall worked in my dorm floor in the 1980s. We even took messages for each other (“Bob, call your mom”)
We saw one at Prairie Creek Redwood State Park (surrounded by Redwood NP).
(Let’s try again…)
Young people in the know were hanging out by the park kiosk, piggybacking on the state park’s wifi so the could check their social media (that’s what they told us).
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Did you get the number?
Does it accept incoming calls?
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Damn! I didn’t. I feel shame.
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