Telebeam: Off the Hook and Off the Grid
November 06, 2009
Telebeam payphones are disappearing from the sidewalks of New York at a rapid clip. In recent days this Telebeam payphone in midtown went from off the hook to off the grid. I spotted this dangling payphone receiver a few months ago (and posted it to my New York City Payphones section), and this week saw that only the empty hull of this payphone enclosure remained. We can assume this payphone enclosure itself will soon be removed.
The removal of this payphone revealed a little more than usual, though, in the form of some previously concealed paperwork stuck behind the phone itself. This orange sheet bears logistical and contact information from Telebeam.
Dial tone service to this public pay telephone was ordered by submission of a public access line order form on 10/10/00 and a conduit in field form on 3/14/01. The underlying dial tone provider has not yet completed certain construction or engineering work necessary to provide dial tone service.
The notice is punctured by a metal screw, and was presumably rendered moot when the "underlying dial tone provider" got their act together.
I do not have many real contacts in the payphone business but I once met a couple of tech workers from Telebeam. This was 4 or 5 years ago, at which time the future of the payphone business still had some tantalizing rays of opportunity. Payphone locations, it was thought by those in the business, could be used as Wi-Fi relay points, police surveillance cameras, or for Internet access points. TCC Teleplex (not to be confused with Telebeam) continues to offer Internet-enabled payphones in Manhattan; and Verizon did, in fact, rig some of its payphone locations with Wi-Fi signal relays. The Wi-Fi initiative seems to have been scotched while the Teleplex payphone Internet kiosks seem to do well. The larger idea of utilizing existing payphone spots for other purposes seems to have faded. Advertising has settled in to place as a primary alternative use for surviving payphones, a practice which essentially subsidizes Verizon's payphone business in the city.
Speaking of "off the hook" I remember now what I long thought was the etymology that idiom. I am wrong about this but I like to believe it anyway as it makes sense to me. I thought the expression originated from this scenario: Two people are having a phone conversation when one of them says something outrageous, something so crazy that the other party throws the phone down and leaves it hanging there, off the hook. Maybe this happened at the site of this bygone Telebeam payphone. There is a telephonic heritage to the expression "ring off the hook", that phrase referring to an incident or individual which prompted enough interest to cause its telephone to ring so much that it could not stay on the hook. The most commonly associated etymology for "off the hook" refers to the fishing scenario in which a lucky fish is caught but then taken off the fishing hook let free by its captor. I do not doubt the provenance of those derivations but I like mine, too, even if I fully concocted it.
