I guess yesterday’s encounter had to happen eventually. If anything it should have happened long ago. As I picked up the handset of the only working payphone in Central Park a woman passing by offered me use of her cell phone. “Do you want to make a call?” she asked. I laughed. A little.

The only frame of reference I had for such an encounter comes from social media. I don’t remember what channel, Twitter or Instagram or whatever, but someone commented that he saw a dude putting coins into a payphone, and that he offered use of his cell phone to that person. The payphone user declined, and the person who described the encounter labeled him a “poorie“, one of the stupidest words I’ve ever encountered.

It should not be lost on anybody how many people, confused when confronted with poverty, choose not to pity, sympathize with, or simply accept the poor. They choose to shit on them, sometimes with self-serving gestures of pity that they brag about to online strangers.

I took no offense at the woman’s assumption about my use of this payphone. She did not look like one who would make an offer like that then, in the next breath, jump onto social media and label me with a derogatory term for the poor. But then I do not consider myself poor, save for the fact that I have no desire for wealth.

I admit, though, that I felt a faint urge to explain myself to this woman at Central Park, to clarify that I am not poor, that I had a cell phone right there in my pocket, that I was not what she thought.

But I let it float, further resisting the urge to suggest to her that handing a $1000 iPhone to a stranger in the park might not be the wisest move.

“Tourist”, I thought.

“Crusty”, she might have been thinking, “Pity the poor not with money or food but free phone calls.”

Wherever this encounter might have gone I just laughed, and said “Don’t worry about it.” But her offering me use of her cellphone confirmed what I’ve always assumed people think when they see me making all my payphone calls. They think “He’s poor”, or “He’s lost”, or “Dude needs a damn phone.” I see the looks from passing strangers, not only when talking on a payphone but also when using a LinkNYC kiosk. I’ve heard groups of high school kids go quiet when they get near enough to see that I am actually interacting with the kiosk’s tablet screen. Their conversation goes into whisper mode. I can’t hear what they say but I know what their quietude means.

If I had said anything else to this woman in the park I would have explained I was not really making a phone call. I had been canvassing a quantity of outdoor payphones in the city to get a handle on how many of them now connect via wireless networks, versus the traditional landline. I knew the transition from landline to wireless had commenced years ago as a pilot program. I did not think it had continued.

It turns out that by my estimate at least 80% of outdoor public phones in New York connect via wireless, with a similar percentage of the payphone enclosures powered by solar energy. This puts most of today’s payphones completely off the power grid, thanks to U.S. Patent #9,614,398 B2, the Custom Wireless Retrofitted Solar Powered Public Telephone, held by Renewable Edge LLC. Think about that the next time you encounter one of those energy-gluttonous LinkNYC kiosks, the self-declared “payphone of the future” that will send every last one of today’s energy-efficient payphones to the scrap heap.

My source of information for determining a payphone’s source of connectivity has been the Truecaller App installed on my cell phone. Truecaller is like a CallerID app on steroids, summoning not just the phone number for an incoming call but also the carrier of the call and the number’s reported spam rating. I suspect its accuracy is not 100% but on balance Truecaller seems to get it right enough of the time for me to say that as many as 80% of today’s outdoor payphones connect wirelessly.

For calls coming from most NYC payphones Truecaller identifies the carrier as “CELLCO Partnership dba Verizon Wireless – NY”. Indoor payphones, like those at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, all seem to be landline. For those phone Truecaller just shows “Verizon” as the carrier.

The move from landline to wireless had some side-effects. The CallerID sent out by most of New York’s payphones will not match the numbers printed on the phones. In the past the City required all payphones to have the correct ANI printed on the phones. Either that rule was waived or enforcement is no longer in anyone’s interest.

Another side-effect of going wireless is that when I called my phone from the wireless payphones the connection took 8-10 seconds to establish itself before my phone rang. Calls from the landline phones connected almost instantly. As with most things technological, progress comes with compromise.

As for the Central Park phone Truecaller identified its carrier as “Verizon”, which would make it a landline phone, but I have my doubts about that particular bit of data. Unlike the husky, rugged sound of the landline phones at Grand Central this connection sounded twangy and fragile. The phone also failed to connect my call, something that almost never happens with landline phones. After dialing I waited 10-15 seconds for my cell phone to start ringing, but it never did. I hung up the payphone. It swallowed my quarters. Dammit. I’ll write off the 50¢ expense.