Cold Call

Remember those pay phones you could drive up to? Those cold, filthy, disgusting, disease-riddled phones out in the dark corner of the carry-out parking lot? You could barely get close enough with your car to reach the phone, and if you were able to park close enough, the metal cord would swoop down and scratch the side of your car. Yeah, those days were fun.  And you’d drop your quarter ‘cause you couldn’t quite reach the coin slot on the phone, but then you couldn’t get out of your car to get it ‘cause you parked so close to the phone. And it was your last quarter. And in the winter those phones were cold and the push buttons froze up. That phone was really cold. I often wondered if the cold phone would stick to my ear like my tongue sticks to stuff outside in the winter. 

When cell phones first came out in the 80’s, I had this co-worker who would call people and say he was calling from his car to try to impress them, but he was really calling from a pay phone that he parked really close to and the phone reached to his car. So he was sort of telling the truth. Funny guy.