Delayed by a problem on a subway at Yonge station, I was prompted for the first time in ages to find myself a pay phone. Prior to my wife's recent pregnancy, I was a dedicated pay phone user; and used to pontificate ad nauseam how pay phones were going the way of the dodo at a very rapid rate. Several months of cell phone usage later, I was really unprepared for how bad things had gotten.
First off, finding a pay phone, even in a hub of public transportation like Bloor/Yonge, proved a surprising challenge. Long gone are the days where the station was equipped with a litter of them scattered across the platforms. After a few minutes of walking I finally located a solitary, lonely, abused, and no-doubt bacteria-ridden device jammed between two support pillars, like an image out of
Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
I slipped a quarter in, and dialed. A spectral, digital voice informed me that I had a credit of 25 cents, and needed to insert 25 cents. When I was a kid, my mother would make me carry a quarter in the outside pocket of my
KangaROOS so that "Just in case, you always have a way to call home". Decades later, that practice still had value. So imagine my shock to learn that as of about a month ago,
pay phones now cost 50 cents per call. And if you use a loonie, no change for you!
Am I the only one shocked to the point of revolution over this horrific turn of events? Pay phones are NOT a luxury item, they are an essential service. They service the poor, the newly arrived, the lost, and the unfortunate.
They are a life-line for all of us in our moments of need. Needing a map of
locations and a pocketful of change to use one degrades, nay destroys, the simplicity and reliability of this essential tool. And I, for one, am outraged.
