I saw one of these on-line and in working order just last summer. I felt like I was seeing a mountain gorilla or something.

When I was in college, we had these on our dorm walls. If someone told us back then that one day we'd be carrying our phones with us, we would have laughed ourselves silly, wondering how the hell people were going to carry a big, heavy payphone with us.

Now I'm feeling old. I do remember seeing phone booths all over Manhattan. Now I see none, maybe the occasional corpse like in the picture. I even remember Penn Station having a telephone area. Welcome to the 21st century.

I'll have to dig up some pics of the old electromechanical switching equipment. I recall touring the local office when I was in the third grade, circa 1968. The switchgear took up nearly all of a three-story building; I'm figuring about 150,000 square feet of floor space, plus a basement filled with transformers and batteries. And it was pretty loud; in some parts of the building the Bell employee leading the tour had to shout to be heard over all of the clicking and clacking. Nowdays, the whole thing fits comfortably in a 10x10 foot cube, and no moving parts.

There was also a room filled with about 25 operator consoles. This was before we had direct-dial of long distance calls, so to make any long distance call, you had to call the operator. It also wasn't too uncommon that when making a local call, the switch would malfunction, and then you'd have to call the operator for assistance. There were, IIRC, three operators whose sole function was to talk to operators in other cities, for resolving problems in the long-distance network.

We've gotten accustomed to the idea that we can make a phone call pretty much any time, no matter what the circumstances. Back then, the switchgear took so much power to run that if the utility power failed, the batteries could only keep the switchgear going for an hour or so. If the power was off longer than that, they'd take the switchgear off line and put a tone generator on all of the phone lines to indicate that making a call was not possible at that time. It was a sound that became associated with horror movies of the day; the heroine is trapped in the spooky house during a thunderstorm, the killer is closing in on her, and she picks up the phone to call for help only to hear "woooooAAAAAAAWooooooowww woooooAAAAAAAWooooooowww". That sound still kind of gives me the chills. Imagine if you were in a storm, your house got hit by lighting and set on fire, and you couldn't call the fire department because the phone system was down? Unthinkable today.

Today is the fifth anniversary of Jerry Falwell's death.

Today is the fifth anniversary of Jerry Falwell's death.

Any excuse for a party!

A lot of people have been posting these relics on Facebook lately. We passed one while visiting a small town recently, and reminisced.

And speaking of Jerry Falwell, I rarely think of him (okay, never), but when I do, teletubbies come to mind. I can't for the life of me remember why!

Because, Meloni, Jerry Falwell was scared of TinkyWink, teh *gasp!* GAY teletubbie! Oh nooooooo!

And yeah, I remember phone booths. *sigh* I kinda miss them. What the hell was the name of that slasher movie, where the psycho guy's job was sanitizing the public pay phones?? I can't for the life of me remember!

Many years ago I was driving and got lost (pre-85). There was this stand-alone telephone booth that was about a block away from a motel one way, and a diner the other. There was nothing else local. Every single pane of glass was broken out. All I could think was Ma Bell was going to have a bad day. LMAO.

Now about the only place you can find a pay phone is in a prison. And I bet if you damage that phone your life would probably be close to forfeit.

That's right! The Great Man-Bag v. Purse Debate.

I picked my brain for the movie you're trying to recall (I do love horror flicks), but can't think of it.