demented and sad, but social

This morning I read this article on new york city, the largest city in the US, has only 4 phone booths left. FOUR. Isn’t that incredible? I wonder when the first one was installed…

I have many memories of phone booths. Nooo, not like THAT. What I was thinking about is the first time I went to new york – I was a freshman in college and I met three friends there for thanksgiving – all from north Dakota. I was very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I KNEW that people could tell I was not from there and that I had no big city experience (living on campus in boston for 2 months does not count as city experience). So before my trip, I went to express (where I also worked) and bought a purse that had a zipper and a lock so that no one could pick pocket me. My friends were meeting me from DC and Philadelphia. I just now realized that none of them knew each other. Funny. Anyway, we were walking near times square and we wanted to use the phone (this is pre-cell phone days of course) and we found a pay phone. Before my friend, shad, went in the phone booth, I sprayed it with disinfectant that I had bought purposefully for the trip. I sprayed the whole booth. I was very proud of myself. And to think there are only 4 left. Probably not the one I sprayed down.

My other thought of phone booths is living in france. Since it was so expensive to set up a landline and even more expensive to call the US from a cell phone, I used to buy phone cards and walk down the street to the phone booth and call my parents. So old school. I spent HOURS in phone booths in france. I think they are still fairly prevalent over there… the thing with phone booths in france is, though, you have to buy a phone card before you can use them. You can’t put money in them – it has to be a card. This can be rather annoying if you don’t have a card or don’t realize whats going on. And you most often can’t use a credit card – it’s a specific carte telephonique that you have to get.

When lisa and meat came to the US a few years ago, they couldn’t figure out how to use the American pay phones. They bitched to me for hours about it the next time I saw them. They were like, “money?! You can ONLY use QUARTERS?!” I couldn’t figure out how they couldn’t figure out how to use the phones. I think it has to do with dialing the “1” first. To this day, they think French phones are easier. Silly Europeans.