I don’t know who is responsible for placing handwritten stickers that read “WE NEED MORE PAY PHONES” on countless New York City payphones. It is not I. But I have seen the stickers on payphones far and wide, from Coney Island to Corona to Lower Manhattan and points all around the city.

Today I spotted something revealing. Someone took the time to etch a hand-written response to the exhortation with an unfortunate observation: The piece of s#*t phone on which the sticker was placed did not work.

It’s true. This non-working phone is a mess, spitting out a dial tone followed by cryptic beeps and sporting touchtone buttons that do not deliver their expected touchtone sounds.

This phone happens to be near and dear to me. It is the rogue payphone I reported on in March, 2017, after I first spotted it perched at the far end of a parking lot at an abandoned business. I remember how incredulous I felt seeing a brand new payphone installation in the year 2017. But it made sense when I got a closer look and found a freestanding, solar-powered cell phone, the likes of which could be placed anywhere.

The phone is illegally installed, but given its position on the property of an abandoned business it has survived, unmolested, for about 2½ years. Unfortunately it quit working several months ago, and its owner has gone AWOL, probably resigned to just leaving this phone to fester in the elements.

But the little bit of dialog on the half-removed sticker above is revealing. I think it confirms that people still look for payphones, and feel their absence.

I further interpret these hand-written notes to suggest callers would actually prefer to use an old-style payphone instead of a LinkNYC kiosk, the so-called “payphone of the future” expected to vanquish all legal payphones from New York. I say that because a LinkNYC kiosk is located just steps away from this payphone. You don’t see anyone slapping “WE NEED MORE LINKNYC KIOSKS” on those stupid machines.

I have seen at least one other response to the “WE NEED MORE PAY PHONES” vandal, in November, 2016, when I spotted the words incongruously scrawled across a missing person flyer. In that case, too, someone saw fit to add an amen/hallelujah, writing “Yes! Not everyone has a phone!”