"To this day, it is still likely the highest-charting song entirely about a public phone box."
https://www.thek6project.co.uk/2022/08/30/meols-merseyside-c...
I remember having fun as a kid placing a reverse charge call from one phone booth to another across the street. Apparently the operator didn't have a way of knowing the number you were asking to make a call to was a phone booth, so your buddy across the street answers the operators call and graciously agrees to accept the reverse charge call (which is then free - no need to put any money in).
They did.
In the UK, when a payphone _answered_ a call, the payphone played a "cuckoo" tone (beep-boop) for about ten seconds. This alerted the operator not to allow reverse charge calls. Of course in more recent yeas an operator probably hasn't a clue what the payphone cuckoo means, hence you getting away with it.
- someone told me about a fish—n-chip buffet in Arbroath, Scotland
- I told my team, one of them asked “just fish?”
- I replied “batter fried pizza too”
- one of them made the inevitable comment about defibrillators
- I pointed out many of these red kiosks have been repurposed to hold defibrillators and went looking for imagesif it’s the fish and chip shop (buffet is a different thing here), i’ve been there and they do a banging fish supper.
“3 courses including Soup, Pizzas, Haddock, Spicy Fish, White pudding, King Rib, Chefs dish of the day. Hot desserts with Custard, Cold desserts i.e trifle and cakes, Cold Meats, Pasta, Salad, Whippy Ice cream.”
I guess it's one downside of dematerialisation with digital tech - I can't think of a single thing that would make sense. Everyone's got their own virtual portal to all the new technologies that come out, there's not much to look at out in the world.
Maybe as more progress happens in physical 'world of atoms' type things we'll see a bit of this come back.
Maybe then many people would stop carrying their own portals, as you can briefly use the public ones for the one-off situation where you need it, but enjoy a portal-free mind the rest of the time. Also quite useful in case emergencies as it seems those portable-portals tend to run out of battery, or get lost or damaged...
Hermes Conrad, Futurama Season 6, Episode 6: Lethal Inspection
In the early days of the Internet, this existed somewhere in western Europe where I was traveling.
There was a phone booth down the block from my hotel and a couple of times I popped in and used it to check my email.
Maybe Vienna or Amsterdam? It was a long time ago. Swiping one's own credit card would have been unusual then, so I have no idea how I paid for it. Especially since I mostly used travelers checks.
Looked better than the weird ad screen monstrosities you get now with a token phone on them.
- Not sure what they're called, but I've seen a lot of fully automated outdoor "locker stations" for packet deliveries
- Power bank "banks" or charging stations for smartphones in indoor spaces like malls
- QR codes on stickers/ads in public spaces are a sort of bridge between the physical and digital worlds
They are already like that for at least a decade. The last time I visited London the phone booths all had ads for escort services pasted inside.
Drop boxes!
I was part of a team prototyping these some 20 years ago. I highly doubt we were the only team doing so, but we were certainly unaware of any commercially available/deployed stations at the time. I was writing the software, in particular the orchestration of the locks and event bus for the transmissions.
Lots of fun from trying to fathom how undocumented solenoids operated, to trips to various countries for remote and environmental testing, and destructive tests simulating someone driving a truck into an installation (i.e., by deliberately driving a truck into one!)
The nerdiest moment was taking a mainboard model that we were getting intermittent faults with and recreating the exact environmental conditions to recreate the problem. This involved incubating the mainboard in a sealed environment chamber to control temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. The fault was bit-flipping because electrons were jumping rails when the microchip(s) were cold and damp.
- tap-to-pay paypoints
- drive-under toll collection readers
- signal-blocking phone pouches at concerts
- anti-facial-recognition dazzle makeup
- wireless chargers in the table at McDonald’s - a tree that grows money
- harmony between worlds
A collision prevention enhancement would be fabulous!
The crowns are also ground off I think
OSM has extensive tagging scheme for phone booths: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dtelephone
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rxcGDAc8Dv924zkv8
(It's art: https://secretldn.com/telephone-box-installation-kingston/)
Many Kingstoners probably think of themselves as being in London. There's some graffiti on the way in to London on the A3 that says "Surrey not Surrey".
I miss the days of the CEX store when it sold import games just round the corner as well.
Considering you have to travel through New Malden, Raynes Park (which for me is the border), and Norbiton to get to London, they would be wrong. I always assume many think like that as it potentially increases house prices but just having a TFL tap and go bus doesn't make somewhere London.
The operation timed out when attempting to contact www.thek6project.co.uk.
They provide a lifeline to women fleeing domestic abuse, who need to contact services without their phone being tracked. Also to homeless and other vulnerable people who may not have access to a phone.
Statistics show lots of calls to emergency services, centrelink (Australia's welfare agency) etc...