I did not feel a need to describe the numerous other techniques which exist to obscure one’s phone from caller ID boxes. I do not know why this particular person felt he needed to do this but his very affable nature and admittedly Luddite approach to technology dispelled any thought that he was up to something sinister. There are any number of legitimate, innocuous reasons why someone would want to call somebody so that their home phone number does not show up on the recipient’s caller ID. To answer those two questions often posed to me - Who still uses payphones, and why? - I use this gentleman as an example.
DONT CALL ME UP ON A PAYPHONE FULL
The safer option for making long distance calls from payphones is to either bring a jar full of quarters and feed the coin slot or use pre-paid calling cards, which generally offer much better and clearer-to-understand rates. As reported by the Chicago Tribune in 2013 the payphone industry blames the high costs of completing credit card calls from payphones on “expenses incurred by having to validate the payment method, billing and collection, bad debt, offering live operators and credit card processing fees.” Without these seemingly exorbitant fees, the argument goes, the payphone industry could not survive, and phones would not be available when your cell phone dies or gets lost. Payphone usage is at an all time low but the cost of making payphones available remains high.
The other opinion is that folks making calls in this manner should expect to pay a premium.
The most common conclusion is that these are predatory businesses operating a scam to rip people off in times of need. There are two schools of thought about this situation. Costs for payphone calls paid for with credit cards are notoriously expensive, with irate consumers reporting charges of $25 a minute for long distance and even local calls. To his third point the answer is yes, you can pay for long distance calls from payphones using a credit card, but don’t do it unless you have absolutely no other option. As he mentioned he was in a suburb of Boston I suggested South Station, where I saw several payphones when I was there last year. To my correspondent’s second point I suggested that the most likely places to find payphones these days are in transit hubs such as train stations and bus terminals. I never listened to the podcast so I don’t know how useful my input was, but it reminded me once again (not that I needed a reminder) of the value in making historical data available. The most prominent example of this in which I had direct involvement came some months ago when a producer of the “Serial” podcast contacted me to evaluate what came to be known as “ The Mysterious Best Buy Payphone“. You’d be surprised how often I field requests or get web traffic from people who, for one reason or another, need to confirm whether or not a payphone once existed at a certain place. The payphone locations are kept available for historical purposes. He was in search of a payphone because he wanted to be able to call somebody without his landline caller ID showing up on the other person’s phone, and he specifically asked me if it would be possible to make such a call with a credit card.įirst of all I warned him not to regard data on The Payphone Project web site as an up-to-date resource. That is not a permanent state.Īn interesting correspondence yesterday with a gentleman reminded me of answers I give to two questions I frequently get: Who still uses payphones, and why?Ī 50+ year old man from a Boston suburb called to thank me for making my pages of Massachusetts payphone locations available. A plan to invite the public to edit and critique payphone locations mapped at has stalled, and the most energy I’ve been able to muster in terms of updates to this site has been the Twitter feed. Between sickness and injury I’ve had a hard time moving forward on my many and varied projects.
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