3695 - Payphone 2

As long as I'm talking about payphones (yesterday) here are some more stories.

This was the first type of payphone I worked on. But not for long.

 They were converted over to this type because it was more secure. (Or not. See yesterday.)

When I was in college we had the older type. Even though the price had risen from $.05 to $.10 yo could still make a $.05 call. You would drop a nickel in and momentarily slam the coin return. This would allow the first nickel to go all the way through and give you dial tone. The phones were taken out because they weren't making enough money.

Years later I was a repairman. I worked mostly on the newer types. They supposedly stood up to punishment better than the old phones. Sort of.

I worked in the downtown area which had the ballpark and the Kiel center. Both had about 70 coin phones. When I was working Sunday coverage and there wasn't much to do I would head to one or the other to test coin phones. During the baseball season or after a concert I could usually find five to ten busted phones.

The most common problem was money jams. Those were pretty easy to fix. Then there was the stretched out handset cords. Those had to wait until the next day to get parts.

If I found any money in the coin return I made sure it went into a special envelope we carried. It was put in the upper housing and then reported to the collection department. You did not want to take any money because the collection department would set up fake phone problems to see if a repairman was taking "phone company money". Take that dime and you're fired.

But for the most part working on payphones was quiet work because you didn't have to deal with people.