Darn. Considering how I enjoy your posts, I was hoping maybe you were In Great Britain, England or the British Aisles, all the same thing.
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Right next to the Weetabix and Marmite.
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And the few remaining are located in poorer, rural areas and provide some of the only telecom access people have.
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Off Topic, but that reminded me of when I go to the Scottish Games, I make sure I visit the British Foods booths. I usually get 3-4 things I’ve never eaten before. Do you know that every American who has ever eaten Spotted Dick has posted a picture of it on the internet?
Actually, I made Spotted Dick for a period dinner we were hosting. No pictures, however.
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In Italy you can go to the post office and filla a form, or call the special number 186, or use an app.
Telegram are still used becuse they’re legally binding and timestamped.
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Newer payphones could be used to text and could accept credit cards, they could be a bit more difficult to use. By the way they don’t work on a regular landline because either are ISDN phones with custom protocol and anti-tamper measures or older analog ones were using four wires instead of two.
To be fair, I think that’s a contractual obligation stipulated in the sale-and-purchase-agreement.
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Okay, but who’s going to teach Colbert how to use a rotary dial phone?
I’m sorry, but I only make calls by clack…
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I’m a millenial and remember using payphones as a kid but I’d probably play dumb if someone pulled this on me because I’m getting tired of the age of millenials continually sliding downward. At some point there will be an entire generation of people who were millenials when the term was coined, but they are too old to be made fun of for not remembering VHS or taking selfies or whatever, so they just don’t have a name.
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October 2009:
April 2011:
November 2011:
July 2014:
January 2015:
February 2018
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The payphone business was destroyed by deregulation in the '90s. Suddenly our local landline monopoly was not responsible for the payphones anymore, suddenly there was no accountability for the new fly-by-night owners when the phones took our money but didn’t make the call correctly, suddenly even the crappy and expensive cell phones that were available back in the day started to look good by comparison.
Yes, except we didn’t. We had a mini-phonebook, a list of just the numbers we needed, and we kept it in our pockets, or wallets, or purses.
We might have remembered a few numbers, but certainly not everyone we knew.
But it was easier when people had the same phone numbers for a lifetime, or as long as they lived in a house.
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It was so great that they ended on her saying, “Jerries? Like Jerry Seinfeld?”
It was worth the whole bit just to get to that!
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yeah, i remember. but we also had several we could rattle off by heart: home, certain friends, work, etc. – i could maybe only do one or two of those nowadays.
I don’t know what he’s talking about. Older Millennials were probably about the only generation to have outdoor payphones on high school campuses.
I took this photo recently. As I continued to walk down the street, I swear they continued to follow me, lurking, lurking…
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So do the British, to be fair
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They are silently judging you.
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