Bring Back the Telephone Booth!

In last Sunday's odds-and-ends post, I offered pictures of a couple of updated cell phones. Today, we look at a proposal to bring back one of the iconic parts of the telephone experience - the venerable phone booth.

If you are my age or older, you no doubt remember the humble telephone booth, which offered a quiet, relatively private location from which to make phone calls. These came in many sizes and shapes, from the traditional glass-and-steel streetside box ...

to the more elegant, burnished wood cabinets found in fancy restaurants and hotels ...

But with the advent of the ubiquitous cell phone, the need for an enclosure containing a coin-operated telephone has pretty much disappeared. The telephone companies have found that installing and maintaining phone booths and coin-operated phones just isn't worth the effort and expense any more, and the traditional telephone booth has gone the way of the Edsel, the passenger pigeon, the dinosaurs, and reasonable, thoughtful statesmen in Congress.

But in an article on CNN yesterday, commentator Bob Greene suggested bringing back the phone booth in a new form - a comfortable, private enclosure for holding conversations, noting that

Phone booths were a wonderfully democratic invention, intended to shut out the noise of the immediate outside world so the person in the booth could privately, in silence, talk with someone miles away.

You've probably been annoyed at least once a day by some clueless ass clown shouting loudly into his (or her) cell phone at inappropriate times and locations, broadcasting the most intimate and embarrassing details of their lives and relationships to everyone within earshot. Mr Greene offers an elegant solution to the problem, asking

If there were clean, convenient, phone(less) booths readily available, don't you think that people would step into them to make their cell phone calls? Who wouldn't opt for privacy and quiet if it was there for them to take?

Who, indeed?

I remember the experience of sitting in cramped, hot phone booths to make the personal long-distance calls I couldn't make from my office phone, and of searching for the loose change demanded by the operator to keep the conversation going. I also remember keeping myself in ice cream money by checking the coin return slot of each pay phone I passed, always finding the occasional dime or quarter to add to my pocket money.

And what about Superman? He used to use phone booths as a convenient, private place to change from mild-mannered Clark Kent into the Man of Steel. What would he do today?

And so I agree with Mr Greene - bring back the phone booth ... without the phone. Offer us convenient, clean, private places to make the cell phone calls we'd otherwise inflict on our neighbors ... or in which to hide from the din of the world around us.

Have a good day, and have it quietly and privately ... your neighbors will thank you.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo