NYC's last freestanding pay phone, my love of the Teledex and the relative joys of Zoom
A phone call used to hold so much power for a certain generation, but now people want you to text before calling.
“Can you text before you call?” say my adult children or anyone else under 40. “It’s jarring when the phone rings.” True, the most common call I receive is from my pal, “Potential Spam.” I see their point.
Last week, the last freestanding pay phone was removed from Manhattan — for placement in a museum. Old-school phone culture will soon be as quaintly obsolete as ear horns. Saying I want a phone conversation these days is tantamount to admitting my creeping elderly irrelevance. This is weird for me since many of my moments of peak power involved the phone: being asked out on dates, triaging patients in a doctor’s office, giving press interviews and gatekeeping for the president of a movie studio. Those blinking lights represented potential conversations, chances to move life forward or direct it down a dead end. They mattered.
As an overweight, shy, troubled youth, my verbal ability shined on the phone. It became key to my earning power from when I was a young teen.
My love — and skill — of talking to people started young. I grew up in a multilingual household, where I often had to surmise meaning from sparse clues. I would hear my mother on the phone with her mother in Sweden, my name all I could really catch in a sea of musical nordic syllables. Our family’s Taiwanese nannies taught my two younger brothers words and numbers they often shared among themselves. Again, I had to rely on hints to determine what was happening.
As an overweight, shy, troubled youth, my verbal ability shined on the phone. It became key to my earning power from when I was a young teen. The skill was listed on my résumé — above “word processing” and “French.” Being “good on the phone” meant that I could simultaneously jot down numbers, names and pleas for attention; juggle the insistent chiming of multiple lines; correctly estimate how long someone had been waiting; and intervene, listen in and make the day flow. Need I say that the appearance of my face on a screen would not have helped me? Revealing to a frightened parent calling the family pediatrician that I was an untrained 15-year-old or a pushy movie producer that I was a powerless 25-year-old, would have benefitted no one. The phone required go-betweens, not exactly Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine on the switchboard, but a thinking human brain with an office-supply message log, someone who made the whole world spin. Now, at 60, I give my age away every time I ask for the communication style I love. A phone call, please?
Rating: 5