This looks like an image from an earlier generation. The harried businessman traveling through New York rushes to a payphone at a busy transit hub and consults his notes, looking for a phone number.
This photo is not from an earlier generation. It is from a couple of days ago. This image is from New York City’s Penn Station in June, 2012. This gentleman picked up this payphone, hung it up, picked up the next payphone, hung it up, picked up the next one, hung it up. Not one of the payphones seen in this photo worked.
In earlier years one expected to find non-working payphones in places like Penn Station but with so many to choose from you could reasonably expect one of them to work.
Not any more.
This man quickly gave up finding a working payphone in Penn Station, begging the question: why are these things even here? Dozens upon dozens of public telephones occupy prime real estate throughout Penn Station, the alternating yellow and black handsets jutting from walls like arced tumescent tongues of desperate dogs, yet almost none of these phones work.
These payphones are owned by Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS), a California-based company which acquired Verizon’s remaining payphones apparently intending to abandon them.
Earlier at Penn Station I spotted this woman trying to make a phone call from a bizarrely museum-like room filled with non-working PTS payphones:
I knew from moments-ago experience that only one or two of the payphones in this room actually worked. Most of the payphones had no dial tone but others had jammed or blocked coin slots. Others still rejected your money outright, returning it straight to the coin return slot with no questions asked and no opportunity to make a phone call.
How can Pacific Telemanagement Services expect anything but failure with such an ornery product as this?
This woman stood to waste precious minutes of her day engaged in a process of elimination just trying to find a working payphone in Penn Station’s hall of payphones. I saw a rare opportunity to make myself useful. I shouted out to her “The only one that works is that one in the corner!” She turned in my direction and thanked me, seeming genuinely appreciative for having saved her the time otherwise wasted patrolling this payphone freakshow in search of the rare PTS payphone that works.
We payphone users have to look out for each other. We have to stick together.
If payphones fail completely the blame will not fall entirely on lack of consumer demand. Part of the blame would fall on the fact that payphones simply do not work when you need them.