Pay Phone Obsession

Too Much Free Time

from the remember-those-things? dept

You might remember pay phones. They’re those public boxes on the street with telephones in them that people used to make calls in the age before mobile phones. Okay, so I’m only joking a bit, but even as phone companies struggle to figure out what to do with pay phones, (suggestion: turn them into WiFi hotspots!) there are some who are obsessed with the idea of calling random pay phones and talking to whoever picks up. For almost a decade, one man has been putting together a huge database of pay phone numbers. Of course, that database has actually turned out to be quite useful. People trying to track down callers (the article lists a mother finding her runaway daughter and a man tracking down a stalker among other things) have used the website to identify the location of a pay phone caller. Of course all this would be much easier if the phone companies published a directory of pay phones – but they don’t see any reason to (despite the stories of people this self-built directory has helped).