Something odd happens when I try to make calls from one of the two payphones outside the chicken place at 44-45 21st Street in Long Island City. The phone on the left could not complete any calls. This was not for lack of dial tone or because the phone spit out any coins I put in.

This payphone’s calls somehow got intercepted by US Mobile, a consumer-oriented wireless provider that would seem to have nothing to do with New York’s payphones. It’s like this payphone is a pre-pay customer of US Mobile, and delinquent on its payment. Calls made from this payphone return this message:

Hello. Your US Mobile plan has run out of credit. That’s why this call could not be completed. Please go to usmobile.com to add a top-off or renew your plan.

That does not sound like a message you’d expect to hear from a public pay telephone. I thought it odd enough that I brought out a field recorder and a suction cup telephone recording pickup to document it. A somewhat unusual busy signal follows the prerecorded message, sounding like an owl.

It reminded me of a time, three years ago, when calls from LinkNYC kiosks did not go through because someone at CityBridge had evidently failed to pay their Vonage bill. All calls from the kiosks returned a message saying “You do not have enough Vonage credits to place this call.” Um, LinkNYC is supposed to be a free phone, isn’t it? Free for me, at least.

It also reminded me that the Strange Doings at 1-800-WEATHER got a little bit weirder not long after I wrote about it. I’ve updated that story.

Unable to make calls from this payphone to 311, 411, 511, etc., I took a chance and deposited a quarter to call my Skype number, imagining US Mobile would somehow know I was calling from a payphone and thus accept my coin deposit as a top-off.

Nothing doing. I didn’t expect it to work, and it didn’t. But it seemed worth a try since it would have been hilarious if it did.

The payphone did not return my quarter.

A majority of New York’s remaining payphones connect to the Verizon wireless network via cellular modems hidden within the payphone enclosure. Sometimes you can see that modem (a Huawei F256VW) exposed or even dangling from the shattered ceiling of the enclosure. Most times the modem is unseen.

The modem is designed to connect traditional landline phones to the Verizon wireless network. That is exactly what it accomplishes with most of the old payphones. Just not this one.

In this case the modem was hidden and secured, so I’m unable to report if it was a Huawei F256VW, or if the modem itself even has anything to do with this bit of weirdness. Did somebody possibly slip a US Mobile cell phone where the Huawei modem is supposed to be? Probably not.

I doubt the answer to this little mystery is more complicated than this: Some random, dormant US Mobile account had its phone number assigned to this payphone. Maybe US Mobile’s CallerID sees the phone number of an abandoned US Mobile account that somehow had its number reassigned to this payphone. The automated system thus delivers the “out of credit” message thinking this is a once-paying customer, and not a payphone.

I’m not saying I know, but it sounds realistic.

If I could have gotten an ANI check that might have provided a clue. But no calls to 1-800-444-4444 were allowed.

The number printed on the phone is 718-729-9311, or RAvenswood 9-9331 as per the old telephone exchange name format. An ANI check would almost certainly have revealed that this payphone’s CallerID would not match the printed one, which by the way was listed on the old payphone directory pages, about three quarters of the way down this page of Queens Payphone Numbers.