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Are They Doing This Just to Tick Me Off?
By Raymond M. Coulombe

Everywhere I go, and I go a lot of places, I see busted pay phones. Wires dangle free from broken off posts. Vandals? Horrible accidents? No, economics, or so I'm told. Phone companies are pulling pay phones out at a prodigious rate. They are in such a hurry they don't even do a good job of it, leaving more than half the hardware behind. Who'd the phone companies get to do the job? Half-trained apes with sledge hammers?

At first, all that destruction made me uneasy. I had flashbacks of when I was a kid growing up. Something nice was broken. I was in the area. Somehow, I was responsible. So I have a dishonest face. It's not my fault I look like an ape. The worst thing about all those broken up phones is that I hadn't had the chaotic joy of smashing them.

On the other hand, I happen to like pay phones. What else can one do with a pocket full of change? And there are other ways to use them. I usually keep a cheap phone card in my wallet just in case I want to make a long distance call. I've connected to the Internet by attaching an acoustic coupler to a pay phone and tweaking the settings on my laptop. Sure, both the pay phone and the acoustic coupler are technological dinosaurs. Big deal, it worked and was cheap.

Phone companies claim that most everyone has a cell phone now so it's not worth the money to maintain pay phones.

In my more paranoid moments I put the blame on Homeland Security, our very own Stazi. Calls from pay phones are inherently anonymous and untraceable. Cell phone calls can be traced. New generation cell phones are even easier to trace.

Sure, I've got a cell phone. I must admit it's come in handy, yet I don't really like it. There is something about a nice big black pay phone receiver that I really enjoy. It's as comforting to the hand as a Colt .45. Those teeny tiny cell phones just don't feel the same. A weighty phone seems to demand weighty conversation.

Am I some sort of Luddite? Maybe, I miss real telephone booths too. Most of my readers are probably lost here. They were about the size of an outhouse . . . Let me try again. It's what Dr. Who travels in, sort of. Superman used to change into his long underwear in one. Lovers used to squeeze into one together during rainstorms and fall even deeper in love. Don't you ever watch old movies?

The loss of the phone booth was the first loss of privacy. A call from a your very own little room was private. When phone companies first started putting phones in those little stand up shoe boxes instead of booths, privacy took a tumble. With it nearly impossible to make an anonymous phone call, privacy disappeared.

So maybe those broken pay phones are just a symbol of lost privacy. That's what I really miss, the assumption that it was just plain polite to give someone making a call a little space. Maybe I'm just ticked off for being somewhat inconvenienced, but it's possible I'm onto something more here. Maybe I don't miss pay phones as much as I miss living in a civil society.

Regular Science Fiction readers have seen distopic societies. We've visualized where all this can go. One note for those who invade and regulate: you don't have any privacy either. Sleep well.

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