Please insert Twenty-Five cents for the next ten minutes

Are you there?
Yes?
Sorry, I had to insert some money and all the sounds went out on my end.


It's been a long while since I've had that conversation. Pay phones are really all but dead. There are a few scattered and sometimes I'll notice one (usually while someone is using it) and reminisce a bit. Growing up in the age of no cellular phones, being poor, and not having a home phone for most of my after-parent's-house life I got the opportunity to use pay phones from time to time.

Today I got to reminisce on something else phone related. This one took me back to before my pay phone life. This one took me back to my party-line days. The days when if the phone rang, it might not even be for your HOUSE for those that never had a party line. You could pick up the phone at any given time and hear a conversation of complete strangers. It was actually more common than not. A quick "sorry" and hang it up was the protocol of the day. We didn't know who else was on our party line. I certainly never asked and I assumed the parentals didn't either. The phone company wasn't going to give out the information, so it was a bit of an unsolved mystery.

Today I heard a message on the phone that took me back to those days. I'm sure those messages have a name, but I'm not in the phone business and know no phone jargon to toss about. But you know the messages, like, "We're sorry. The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again." Now you're up to speed. Anyway, today's message was, "We're sorry. All circuits are busy. Please hang up and try your call again later."

Has the phone infrastructure lagged that far behind? I was under the assumption that when DSL became a "thing" and for that matter the internet as a whole, the phone companies were raping us for new charges that they had never dreamed of. It was a phone company windfall for sure. Multiple phone lines in every house. Extra charges for high speed internet, equivilant to 2 or 3 times the rate for an actual phone line. More taxes to pay off the spanish-american war (that I half wonder how much is going to the government since the damned war has been over for a century and the thing is still not paid off.) Certainly the phone companies saw a boon of business and cash that was unequaled by anything in our lifetimes due to the internet. "OH, we had to pay for training, equipment, and internet infrastructure" the phone companies would cry. BS. We all know it. If you don't know it you must work for the phone company AND believe their hype. I don't know how much the phone company execs reaped in this time of the new gold rush but I'll bet it was quite a pretty penny. The right thing to do would have been to decline the X million dollar raise, saying it needed to go to more infrastructure to better the company... oh wait, I don't think I'd turn down even an X * .5 million dollar raise, so I'll quit with the rant. On with the closing thoughts.


...And yet, every now and then, even in times of non-emergency, sometimes Agnes down at the switchboard, gets overrun. In those times she just patches you through to switchboard #13... the one that says, "We're sorry. All circuits are busy. Please hang up and try your call again later." Today was that day in South Carolina.