There was a bank of five or six payphones in the common area at my high school. Someone found out there was a number you could call which, after you hung up would immediately generate a callback to the phone it was called from. It was not uncommon to have all the phones ringing constantly.
My high school only had one pay phone. It had a bad connection in the hand set, so sound cut in and out constantly. People rarely ever bothered making calls on it. The coin return also had some sort of obstruction inside it. If you inserted a quarter and then hit the coin return lever, you’d hear it fall, but it didn’t actually come out. When enough quarters built up though, they would all flood out into return tray at once. Naturally, it got used as a slot machine. Drop in a quarter, pull the tiny lever, and see if you hit the jackpot.
We had a deaf school in our high school, so one of the payphones had a keyboard and an operator would read your messages to the other party. My friend used to use it to call his friend and see how many dirty words he could get the operator to say.
When I managed a hardware store back in the day we got scam calls fairly regularly via these types of teletext-to-operator schemes. It was always some bullshit about somebody needing 144 chainsaws or 200 lawn mowers or some shit, and they always wanted to try to pay with a check routing number, and they always wanted it delivered sight unseen to some highly suspicious location. It must have been extra infuriating for the operators, because they know damn well it’s a scam but apparently they weren’t allowed to interject or add to the conversation in any way to tell the recipient this. Of course we knew what was up, so I’d instruct the operator to relay to the scammer the longest and most inventive list of insults I could think of to see if I could get them to giggle. The operator, that is. Not the scammers.
I presume the scammers were connecting to the phone network via the internet, probably itself dial-up at the time.
weren’t allowed to interject or add to the conversation in any way
I think the best they can do is press a button that says they’ve “become biased” and will connect you to another operator. My friend got them to do that once.
There was a bank of five or six payphones in the common area at my high school. Someone found out there was a number you could call which, after you hung up would immediately generate a callback to the phone it was called from. It was not uncommon to have all the phones ringing constantly.
My high school only had one pay phone. It had a bad connection in the hand set, so sound cut in and out constantly. People rarely ever bothered making calls on it. The coin return also had some sort of obstruction inside it. If you inserted a quarter and then hit the coin return lever, you’d hear it fall, but it didn’t actually come out. When enough quarters built up though, they would all flood out into return tray at once. Naturally, it got used as a slot machine. Drop in a quarter, pull the tiny lever, and see if you hit the jackpot.
We had a deaf school in our high school, so one of the payphones had a keyboard and an operator would read your messages to the other party. My friend used to use it to call his friend and see how many dirty words he could get the operator to say.
time to call a telephone sex hotline via the operator
When I managed a hardware store back in the day we got scam calls fairly regularly via these types of teletext-to-operator schemes. It was always some bullshit about somebody needing 144 chainsaws or 200 lawn mowers or some shit, and they always wanted to try to pay with a check routing number, and they always wanted it delivered sight unseen to some highly suspicious location. It must have been extra infuriating for the operators, because they know damn well it’s a scam but apparently they weren’t allowed to interject or add to the conversation in any way to tell the recipient this. Of course we knew what was up, so I’d instruct the operator to relay to the scammer the longest and most inventive list of insults I could think of to see if I could get them to giggle. The operator, that is. Not the scammers.
I presume the scammers were connecting to the phone network via the internet, probably itself dial-up at the time.
I think the best they can do is press a button that says they’ve “become biased” and will connect you to another operator. My friend got them to do that once.
I know this would be annoying as heck, but I’m laughing my ass off imagining this.
I would totally have done this too.
I used to do this at my school, and sometimes the payphones in the metro. Can confirm, I was annoying.