Don't leave me hanging...

I was in Cambridge this weekend and saw this ‘heritage’ red box so decided to do a post on the good old telephone.

I’ve had a series of scam calls recently – numbers I don’t recognise, both landlines and mobiles. Like most people I don’t usually pick up to random numbers but a couple of the scammers have been repeat callers so I’ve connected. I’ve worked out the trick is to answer but to remain silent. The scammer then hangs up, presumably because your voice would trigger an automated recording or script?

I find it interesting that most people really don’t use their mobiles to actually speak to people. Sometimes, if email hasn’t worked, I might call someone about a work thing and they always sound either super guarded or surprised to hear a voice.

During high school holidays my friends and I would buy a cheap day tube ticket and spend hours going round the London Underground' network, jumping on and off trains, trying to lose one of our party so we could laugh at them through the window as the train pulled off. (If, like me you love the Tube Map, check out Metrodle.)

Sometimes, if we’d ventured far from home we would find the nearest phone box and make a reverse charges call. To do this you had to dial 100 and ask the operator to phone your home. You’d then hear someone pick up and the operator say, ‘I have a reverse charges phone call, will you accept the call?’ Fortunately my parents always did, allowing me to whine, ‘Can you come and pick us up?’. I remember one occasion when another of our party tried and their parents said ‘NO!’ to the operator, much to his – and our – horror.

In the days of mobile phones the idea of having to find a phone box to call someone is bizarre. Not only did we have to find a phone box we had to make sure we had the right coins in order to use it. We’d dial our number and wait for the person to pick up. When they did you’d hear a series of pips and you’d have to push your coin – initially 2p or 10p, going up to 5p or 10p – into the relevant slot in order to be able to talk. The pips would go again after a certain amount of time and you’d have to feed the phone in order to continue the conversation or splutter goodbyes before the line went dead.

My childhood home had a bar! What used to be a garage had been converted into a spare living room by my dad. It was called ‘the bar’ thanks to the bar he built – a poorly cobbled together thing with fake plank cladding and topped with tiles. Behind the bar were optics with empty bottles (my parents didn’t drink spirits). The walls were decorated in green flock wallpaper, flimsy faux brass plates and fake muskets.

The bar was also home to our very own payphone! Despairing at how much time we three kids spent jabbering away to friends on the phone Dad put phone locks on the ones in the living room, porch and kitchen. Unbeknown to him we had learned what would today be called a hack that allowed us to continue using the phone: if, for example, the number you were trying to call began 422 you could quickly press down the black prongs the receiver sat on four times, leave a short gap and press them quickly down twice, short gap, press twice again etc until you’d tapped out the whole number and your call would connect.

When the bills refused to fall Dad did what any sane person would do and had a payphone installed! So whenever we called friends we’d have to put a coin in as the pips sounded. This kept the bills in check… until my older sister and I found out where Dad kept the key to the phone’s coin box (also in the bar) meaning we could speak for hours for just 5p – we just repeatedly fed the same coin back in as it fell down the chute into the box.

During my time in Barcelona public phone boxes would sometimes go rogue and not charge for calls. Fellow English teachers (who used public phones more than natives who had phones at home) would share intel of where these phones were. There would always be a queue of people waiting to use them. It was very civilised – an unspoken rule dictated that you mustn’t be a hog when phoning back home. There were always people I knew in the queue turning the wait into a social event.

I actually had a phone in the last flat I lived in. When I was getting ready to move back to the UK I let all my friends come round to call friends and family back home as I didn’t intend to pay the bill, which must have been monumental. I used to wonder if I’d ever be able to get a landline if I moved back. I wouldn’t need one now, of course.