Payphone or telephone booth

We live in Smartphone era, but there was some period, peoples depend on phone were only on telephone booth and payphones fixed at some particular place or office or junction. For many people in India and abroad these payphones still helps at communication in absence of mobiles or emergency contact. Before telephones arrive at our homes, we used to visit the telephone booth or PCO (public call office) to make phone calls; and in my childhood days I have accompanied many a time my aunt to the red telephone booth or payphone in our area (Adyar) to make calls to her friends. I really enjoyed accompanying her not only because it was fun dropping the coin into the photo box and then dialing the rotary dial, she also get me chocolate or ice-cream while back home. 

Apart telephone booths, sometime we also visit our neighbor’s house (one or two houses that have telephone connection then) to make emergency call and also give their number to our relatives and friends to call in case of anything important. The same thing happens when we bought telephone, some of our neighbors get calls from their relatives and we have go and call them at their home… which only then we realized how difficult we gave to others. Lol

There were also few shops in our area then had telephones, which they also make it as a public phone and collect money for talking. We were also asked to press a red button (an additional device attached to the phone to calculated our talk time) when beeps rise at the end of each minute of the call, like how we drop one rupee coin in the payphone boxes at the end of each minute to continue our talk. 

Those days, I guess, we can’t make STD (subscriber trunk dialing) calls or talk out of our city or town from the telephone booth or payphones but only visiting the specify shops that has STD or ISD facilities. Making an STD also means paying more money, so people don’t make much calls unless important and also put their calls short and sweet thinking of the high rate. These days we can’t find any of those pretty red telephone booths, but only the yellow payphones fix to the walls or poles in public places or in front of the shops and the minimum rate of call to make allover India is Rs.1 per minute. These payphones are provided by public telephone sector ‘BSNL’ and the amount received through these boxes are collected by neither shop owners nor BSNL employees, for which they are paid commission.

Footnote:

The picture above is a coin operated payphone… kept at a shop in a village called Kuppanur, on the foothills of Yercaud, Salem district of Tamil Nadu. The yellow phone was catching my attention for photo and it was the inspiration to write on phones here.