Per my minimalist leanings, I do not own a smartphone. Nor have I ever owned a cell phone. Key among the reasons for this is I have yet to come across a mobile phone capable of providing the same consistently high quality reception I get from the dinosaur contraption that is my home phone landline. Call me quaint, old-fashioned or curmudgeonly, but I refuse to lower my lifelong standard of having my every telephone conversation be – per the ads from yesteryear – “the next best thing to being there.” On the rare occasions when I use someone else’s cell phone – or when calling a cell phone - I invariably become annoyed by the patience-fraying intrusion of delays, overlapping dialogue and blips in transmission so garbled they rival Neil Armstrong’s first words from the lunar surface.
OK, I’ll admit it; I’m cheap, too. One phone is enough, I say.
But where does this leave me when having to place a call while away from home? For decades the trusty payphone proved ever reliable, the coin-fed apparatus a dependable tool at a reasonable price.
I believe the days of the conveniently located payphone are numbered, however, for with each passing year I inch closer to finally joining the ranks of the smartphone generation, bidding farewell to the payphone days of yore. Why? Because they are going the way of the buggy whip.
For quite some time I have become increasingly frustrated by the dwindling number of payphones. They are, in fact, becoming all but extinct, their slow and steady decline relegating cell phone holdouts like myself to occasionally having to rely upon friends or the kindness of strangers for use of their cell phones.
Desiring to bolster the aforementioned with firsthand statistics, I recently walked a four-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard from Doheny Drive to Vine Street. My initial plan to stroll east on one side of the boulevard, then west along the other was rendered unnecessary by the sheer dearth of payphones, their pitifully small number prompting me to simply cross over to the other side of the street upon spotting another payphone.
With notebook and pen I recorded the location and condition of each and every payphone along my route, the twofold results of which were equally disappointing, albeit hardly surprising. On what might well be the most famous thoroughfare in all of Los Angeles, I came upon only ten functioning payphones, a few of which nevertheless refused to relinquish coins to which they were not mathematically entitled. As for the others, their purposeless existence was mirrored by their abject physical state. Many of the receivers had been vandalized to the point of being smashed in half or ripped out entirely, leaving behind a tangle of multicolored wires soldiering on to communicate one last, desperate message: Upkeep is not high on the list of priorities of “the phone company.” From Highland Avenue to Vine Street – in the very heart of Hollywood - there was not a single payphone to be had. Nor did any of the service stations I passed along the way have a payphone, one that might sorely be needed by a customer whose car has just been towed onto the lot yet who does not possess a cell phone. As best I can tell, this leaves only two remaining places where one can reasonably count on finding a working payphone: hospitals and airports. To those clinging to the belief that a cell phone is more luxury than necessity, I say this: It’s not looking good.
I’m not so naïve as to anticipate a resurgence of payphones in the years ahead. Like most anyone, I predict the opposite, i.e. their inevitable demise. Perhaps in a few years I’ll trek along Sunset once again to conduct a second survey. I’m fairly certain, however, that by then the tally of working payphones will have slipped from its lofty perch of double figures. I realize the clock is ticking and not at all in my favor, so I suppose I should begin preparing for the day looming large before me when, at long last, I will utter those dreaded words: “Can you hear me now?”
BILL
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