Hack the Planet? Nah. This TTY Slid Right Open.

I could lie and say I hacked the planet getting this grubby old payphone TTY to open. Really, the thing just opened right up. Any other TTY I’ve found has the keyboard securely locked until, I assume, someone legitimately needs to use it and has connected with another TTY user or someone whose receipt of communication goes through a live 711 operator.

There is said to be a code you can dial — *8**8* — that would open the keyboard of an Ultratec TTY for maintenance purpose and to get usage stats. I am yet to find a payphone TTY where *8**8* works.

The payphone TTY has always been kind of a mystery to me. I’ve never seen one in use, nor have I found first-hand accounts of real-world usage where someone used a payphone to make a TTY call.

I was surprised, in January, to find a fully-ejected TTY keyboard at the 125th Street A/C/B/D subway station. With no way to tell if it had been used for TTY communication or ejected by mechanical error I just left it as it was. It is gone now.

When posting the above video to Twitter I was, not surprisingly, the first ever to use the #payphonetty hashtag.

I thought the cards might be part of some intriguing bit of TTY mystery but I doubt it. The cards come from a boardgame and somehow ended up in this TTY drawer, which anyone can open. I imagined two deaf and mute people playing card games via this public TTY but that does not seem to be the case.