Have you ever...
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Have you ever...
@neil and made free international calls, by a number of methods.
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Have you ever...
@neil "Were you alive 40 years ago?"
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@neil wait does the phone card one mean the type for payphones, or does it include cards used to top up PAYG mobile phones? cos I definitely used the latter.
@gsuberland @neil I’m not sure if there’s a UK vs elsewhere distinction here but: in the US a “phone card” often meant something kind of like a phone company-account specific access card. It was also called a “calling card”. You’d dial a number (with an extra code/digit string to enable “calling card” mode), wait for the phone to make a “ka-BONG” sound, then dial the phone card ID number, and your call would go through and be billed to the account associated with the card. My parents gave me the phone card number for their account when I was in college in the 1990s so I wouldn’t have to worry about phone charges calling them.
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Have you ever...
7 out of 8 boxes ticked. <sigh>
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@neil I've done all but two (reversed charges & dialed from one exchange to another).
I am an old.
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@gsuberland Ooh, good clarification. I was meaning in the context of a payphone here.
@neil @gsuberland the standard prepaid magnetic cards or the international cards with a secret number to input?
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@neil when I was a teenager, we all used to hang around at a park on a corner by a phone box. Our mums all had the phone number of that phone box so they could ring us and let us know when it was time to come home for tea.
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New Mastodon Poll Reveals 87% of Mastodonians Are Old AF
@argv_minus_one @neil Mastodon is a just a seperate interwebs for elder Millennials, Gen-X'ers, and Boomers. Sometimes we let the kids hang out with us because we're cool like that. And oh yeah, rumor has it that John Mastodon is like 68 or something.
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Have you ever...
@neil I've received a call on a pay phone exactly once. It wasn't for me, the box was just ringing so I answered it. The caller asked for Sarah. I said "sorry, nobody carried Sarah lives here" and they rather surprised me by asking "are you sure?"
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@neil are you under 46?
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@neil I have also used a pay phone on a train.
@ColinTheMathmo @neil 100% on all of them. I also remember the loud "cuckoo" tone on inbound calls to a payphone (to prevent reverse charge calls being made via the operator), also during late 1980a if you tried some calls on level 1 such as 16 (Dial a disc) and another one (it was some number like 159) you would just hear a loud cuckoo sound from *inside* the phone box and the call would be abruptly cleared down (presumably this is because a metering pulse had come down the line but you hadn't put any money in)
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@neil when I was a teenager, we all used to hang around at a park on a corner by a phone box. Our mums all had the phone number of that phone box so they could ring us and let us know when it was time to come home for tea.
@girlonthenet @neil
So that really worked, eh? I've only ever seen on TV or movies when calls come in to a phone booth, never in real life.When I was a kid I was 100% unreachable out of the yard; I'd just end up eating leftovers if I happened to be out late and missed supper.
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@neil I still have the last phone book that was delivered here, maybe 15 years ago now. Probably not much good for anything other than holding up a potted plant.
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@neil Yes I know, I'm feeling old!
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@gsuberland @neil I’m not sure if there’s a UK vs elsewhere distinction here but: in the US a “phone card” often meant something kind of like a phone company-account specific access card. It was also called a “calling card”. You’d dial a number (with an extra code/digit string to enable “calling card” mode), wait for the phone to make a “ka-BONG” sound, then dial the phone card ID number, and your call would go through and be billed to the account associated with the card. My parents gave me the phone card number for their account when I was in college in the 1990s so I wouldn’t have to worry about phone charges calling them.
@gsuberland @neil wing entrusted with the parents’ phone card in the 1990s naturally replaced the previous “emergency call home” system in the 1980s, which was reverse charges (“collect calls” here in the US).
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@neil Stop reminding me I'm old, will ya?
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All but one of the above. I never did the exchange thingy. But the rest, yeah, in my early teens.
And only reverse charged my parents, with their agreement in advance!
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All of those, and I've also used a party line.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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Have you ever...
@neil I just used my DNS
