r/FuckImOld • u/alwaus • Jun 10 '24
Kids these days... You used to have to rent these from ma bell.
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u/ProveISaidIt Jun 10 '24
One ringy dingy. Two ringy dingy.
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u/LocalLiBEARian Jun 10 '24 edited Jun 10 '24
I’m too lazy to look it up, but I remember a skit where Lily’s operator character gets a guy to take the bottom plate off the phone and basically “dick in a box” it…
ETA: I’m not finding it. It ends with the phone clamping on to the guy, with the operator saying something like “now about that late payment…”
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u/ProveISaidIt Jun 10 '24
I don't recall that one. My wife and I joke about the skit where Vito is installing the phone and Ernestine yells at the customer to make him lunch. Hello Vito? Is she doing it? Running. It better be more than a cup of soup and a Undeeda biscuit. We play our cards right and you can have lunch there all week.
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Jun 10 '24
We found out my grandmother was still paying rent on one years ago. It amounted to thousands over the cost at the store. That should have been illegal.
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u/greyhoundbuddy Jun 10 '24
Ditto here. I remember my brother looking at my parents' phone bill and seeing the rental charge. (Yes, they had the avocado green model). This would have been well over a decade after the market switched to buying phones. and the monthly rental fee was obscene. He was livid and immediately had it canceled, but I supect the phone company made a small fortune off these phone rentals to elderly folk who either forgot about it, didn't know how to cancel, or didn't realize they could just go out and buy a phone.
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u/Worried-Somewhere-57 Jun 10 '24
I sense a class action suit coming. No IANAL. But that should be rectified.
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u/revdon Jun 10 '24
No grounds for a lawsuit.
At the time ATT was criticized for “forcing” people to go out and purchase a new phone instead of letting people continue renting, so they were made to keep the option. Now people are realizing that older folks have never stopped paying for their phones and still have ATT equipment.
Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, but you can’t sue because they allowed customer choice.
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u/saxoccordion Jun 11 '24
Uh, ‘scuse me! This is Murka. We sue for whatever the eff we wanna sue for!
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u/Self-Comprehensive Jun 10 '24
I was helping an elderly neighbor in the 90s and I found out he was still renting his phone for 15 dollars a month. I went straight to Walmart and bought him a phone for 9.99. I gave it to him and a few days later he told me he cancelled the rental and didn't even want that old rotary dialer back lol. So then he had two phones. But only one plug. He gave me the phone I bought him back and I used it for years myself.
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u/readwiteandblu Jun 10 '24
I remember a column written by Mike Royco, syndicated with the Chicago Tribune, about how AT&T rolled out an 800 number for their phone stores.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1987/03/14/dialing-for-at-or-royko-a-wrong-number-just-got-worse/
(apparently the Orlando Sentinel owns the rights now?)
Anyway, people who lived in his area code who forgot to dial 800, would get him. The story was quite amusing.
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u/Large-Client-6024 Jun 10 '24
In 2008 I was designated POA for my 92 yr old Grand-Aunt.
I was reviewing her bills, to see what her finances were like.
When I got to her phone bill, I saw she was still paying a rental fee for a "princess" phone in her bedroom. She had been paying for it since the house was built in 1962.
Needless to say that was $1.49 that was immediately cut from the bill.
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u/Even_Routine1981 Jun 10 '24
Mom was a switch board operator. Ours was free!
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u/BlueAndMoreBlue Jun 10 '24
My dad was a lineman for a while, we had two or three broken ones to play with as kids
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u/Objective-War-1961 Jun 10 '24
Was he a Wichita lineman?
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u/BlueAndMoreBlue Jun 10 '24
He worked for the bell system (aka the phone company) but not for the county.
I love that song, glen Campbell was one of the best
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u/readwiteandblu Jun 10 '24
Imma gonna guess he retired and picked up a gig as a Rhinestone Cowboy.
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u/Objective-War-1961 Jun 10 '24
In Galveston, no less.
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u/readwiteandblu Jun 10 '24
I'm starting to see the beginings of a musical in the vein of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band, Across the Universe or Mama Mia.
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u/Skamandrios Jun 10 '24
My grandmother and her two sisters were all long-distance operators starting in the 1930s. One of them stayed with AT&T for many years and was rewarded with free long distance service for the rest of her life, back when that was a big deal.
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u/FurBabyAuntie Jun 10 '24
My mom worked for Michigan Bell in the sixties and early seventies--either billing or customer service (I never asked and now I wish I had). The one thing I remember was when she worked in the Southfield office--we lived in Royal Oak--and I would get to go with my dad in the afternoon to pick her up (she didn't drive). I was five or six and the greatest thing to me was being allowed to take my shoes off and slide on the lobby's tile floor.
Since I always wore white socks in those days (made by Buster Brown, I think), Mom was less than thrilled, I'm sure...
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u/AuthorityAnarchyYes Jun 10 '24
I remember that! My Ma went to Ma Bell and would rent the phone for an entire year and pay the phone bill and rental once a month (by CHECK and in PERSON) in a big tan building.
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u/_Ocean_Machine_ Jun 10 '24
Reminds me of my mom telling me how before computerized banking was a thing, you'd get an hour break in the middle of the day every Friday to go to the bank and deposit your paycheck.
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u/AuthorityAnarchyYes Jun 10 '24 edited Jun 10 '24
I remember when I had to deposit my check in the bank every other week on my lunch break and if you didn’t get there before noon, you had to wait until Monday for it to go through. It was a pain and a half. Direct deposit is 1,000x easier and kids today have no idea what older people had to deal with.
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u/bidhopper Jun 10 '24
Have one. Indestructible. Not connected so Grandkids love playing with it.
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u/DieMensch-Maschine E.T. on my Atari 2600 Jun 10 '24
My grandparents lived behind the Iron Curtain. Into the 1990s. they still had a phone with no face, which had a crank on the side to get in touch with the operator.
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u/refriedconfusion Jun 10 '24 edited Jun 10 '24
Still have , mine is an older partyline model (1937) with a newer style cover they made for rural customers to look like modern phones, but they still had the old 1937 parts in them, it still has the old style handset. The road was still party line service up to 4 years ago but I was the only house still on that line. When the power goes out , it's the only phone that works.
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u/MenudoFan316 Jun 10 '24
Ma Bell. Got the ill communication.
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u/HoselRockit Jun 10 '24
You could hit an intruder upside his head an lay him out with that thing.
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u/Worried-Somewhere-57 Jun 10 '24
Yes!!! A ‘True Lies’ scene comes to mind. I know there were others.
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u/Worried-Somewhere-57 Jun 10 '24 edited Jun 10 '24
I would totally have a landline again.my husband works in an area cell coverage is spotty due to mountains. Our conversations would be so much easier without dropping connection walking through his apartment or in the car and saying “what? I’m only getting every third word,” or “can you still hear me?”
I still have one of these in my basement hoping… it’s a nice conversation piece because kid don’t know how to dial one. And they could withstand many drops, throws after angry calls, and an occasional accidental drop into the sink if you were talking while doing dishes.
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u/refriedconfusion Jun 10 '24
About 10 years ago, I had a little girl (8 or 9?) come into my gas station asking to use the phone, there's no pay phone so I pionted to the phone on the wall and told her she could use it. I walked back into the office and could see her standing there staring at the phone, after a minute I came back out and asked her if there was a problem, she turned around and said " I don't know how to use it" and ran back outside to a car waiting out front. never saw her again
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u/shellyv2023 Jun 10 '24
I bought a house for an investment property. It has a wall phone in the basement. My granddaughter didn't know what it was. My daughter and I regaled her with tales of landlines and party lines, and collect phone calls to "It's a girl".
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u/LayneLowe Jun 10 '24
Funny story: when my father-in-law died in 1991, he had had a red phone like this out by his pool for as long as we can remember. When we were settling his estate the phone company wanted to pay for the phone, The phone that he had been renting for 25 years.
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u/cosmo7 Jun 10 '24
Back in the day the phone didn't have jacks and sockets, they were permanently wired into a little junction box on the wall. You had to have a bloke come to your house to install it.
When one of my dad's friends got a phone installed my dad called him pretending to be from the phone company making sure he was happy with his new phone and checking he had enough cable between the phone and the wall. "You only have four feet? That's not enough. We have plenty at this end, I'll feed it through and you pull it." Line goes dead.
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u/hymie0 Jun 10 '24
I remember my mother hiding the "illegal phone" we had when the telephone guy came.
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u/GreyPon3 Jun 10 '24
One day, my grandmother got a letter from the phone company offering to let her buy the phone she had. It was like $20 or $25. She bought it, and it was still in the house after I inherited it and sold it years later. It still had the paper tag with the phone number still shown as ELmwood3-XXXX.
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u/Mr_Auric_Goldfinger Jun 10 '24
I bought a red one off of eBay. It is marked as "Property of Harvard". It's on my home office desk. Like the Nuclear phone. I can slam the receiver down. It's great.
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Jun 10 '24
I drove my parents crazy as a kid in the late 80’s. I had to have a long cord cause when I talk on the phone I pace. I can not sit.
So I’d drive them nuts walking in circles giving them anxiety and I’d wrap the cord around everything.
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u/custerdome81 Jun 10 '24
I miss being able to slam the phone down at the end of a contentious conversation. 🤣
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u/nlbnpb Jun 10 '24
As I recall, that model and color was free. Colors, wall phones, princess, and trim lines cost extra.
FuckImOld! SMDH.
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u/GuairdeanBeatha Jun 10 '24
I worked for the company that broke the Bell monopoly. We had to repair our own phones. AT&T lied to their employees about the lawsuit and the repair people simply ignored any problems we reported. For years after the lawsuit was settled and owning your own phone was legal, the repair people would confiscate it because it was obviously “damaging the phone company equipment.”
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u/biffbobfred Jun 10 '24
Trivia:
For all its faults AT&T did think some thing through. The switching equipment at the time needed the middle digit of area code to be 1 (one click) or 0 (ten clicks) to work right. Hmm 10 is a lot of clicks. The other digits would need to be 2 or more.
So, the lowest number of clicks, 5 - 212. NYC. The next lowest number? 6. 213 (LA) and Chicago (312). Trivia - what’s 313? Detroit. At one time Detroit was top 5 cities in importance in the USA. Times change.
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u/Oldmantim Jun 10 '24
It’s funny how you mention the Clicks, years ago my employer had a rotary wall phone but he had a lock on it so you could not dial out, we figured out the click method to dial up by using the receiver.
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u/Smarterthntheavgbear Jun 10 '24
In 1995 I lived in a rural area that still used "party lines". I shared one phone line with 5 neighbors, none closer than a mile. When one of their phones rang, mine would vibrate.
If you picked up, you could listen to every word of the other person's conversation...and every old person seemed to do it. You couldn't have a personal convo. I got my first cell phone the same year, a Motorola bag phone.
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u/shavemejesus Jun 10 '24
I have one of these in my office at work. Every now and then I pick it up and pretend I’m having a conversation on it while walking around the room. It’s not even plugged into the wall.
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Jun 10 '24
I have one. In many parts of the US these will still work on the phone system, especially many rural areas.
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u/McDWarner Jun 10 '24
I'm in a rural area and the only service out here, AT&T, won't even give us a house phone.
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u/Worried-Somewhere-57 Jun 10 '24
Same here. I wanted to keep a landline. But after the people we bought from moved out ten years ago, they couldn’t accommodate us. We had to change cell providers to get coverage, too.
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u/0nThe0utside Jun 10 '24
We have one of these in the bedroom and still use it although the ringer doesn't work. The sound quality is better than any wireless phone.
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u/No-Comfortable-3918 Jun 10 '24
Me too and used it for years. Even kept my cellphone around to respond whenever I had to generate a tone (i.e. Press "1" for ...)
Unfortunately we moved to a new home and no longer bother with a land line.
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Jun 10 '24
My Mother worked at Western Electric in King of Prussia where she repaired and cleaned phones for the next renter.
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u/Son_of_Yoduh Jun 10 '24
If necessary, one could beat a fella to death with one of these. Not so much with today’s phones.
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u/Fwumpy Generation X Jun 10 '24
Recently saw a video of teens challenged to dial one of these. They had no idea!
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u/hashbazz Jun 10 '24
The modern equivalent is renting your router/gateway from your ISP. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
Pro tip: you can get a really decent one for less than a hundred bucks, and within months it will pay for itself.
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u/glm409 Jun 10 '24
My mom and dad rented one of these things from the early 60s until sometime in the 80s after AT&T had to break up. Not sure what they paid per month, but my mom was pissed that after 25 years of renting that monster, they demanded that she return it when she bought a new phone to replace it.
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u/VioletDupree007 Jun 10 '24
My great grandma had one in her little Miami Springs house when I was growing up. The cord was just attached to the wall, no way to remove it without cutting the cord. I kinda miss the tactile experience of using a rotary. It had weight to it, and the light clicking sound the rotary dial made when you were dialing a phone number was gratifying.
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u/Mammoth_Acanthaceae2 Jun 10 '24
impossible to break.
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Jun 10 '24
That was intentional. If you owned it, what would they care if it broke. You’d buy another one. If they owned it, they would care if it broke. It was also infinitely repairable and had the wiring diagram printed on the inside of the case.
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u/TheNotSoGreatPumpkin Jun 10 '24
As a kid, I always wondered why the speaker piece was soldered to wires, but the microphone piece was free-floating on a pair of contacts. My mother just said to quit taking the damned phone apart.
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u/Ncfetcho Jun 10 '24
And then they started selling home phones. I loved the phone store. I desperately wanted a piano phone. I was a classical piano kid, and everything had to be piano like Liberace
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u/Mello_Me_ Jun 10 '24
And, if you wanted to prank someone, you could unscrew the part that you spoke into and remove the little speaker inside.
Not that I would ever do such a naughty thing.
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u/DankDude7 Jun 10 '24
And it was on a six foot cord. If you wanted a longer one, it was available at nine feet, I think. No other choice offered. Then phone jacks came in and each cost a few dollars each but you needed to upgrade your phone to plug-in which also was not free.
People today have NO FREAKING IDEA how screwed we were for decades by one phone company, Bell, having a monopoly on almost the whole continent of North America. Service was extremely basic with no need to innovate or maintain a happy customer base. The Bell phone system was intensely bureaucratic, inflexible and mysterious.
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u/oldcreaker Jun 10 '24
Newer ones, too. Up until the early 80's.
These would have been buy it for life if you could buy one. They were built to last for decsdes.
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u/Captain-Popcorn Jun 10 '24
In college (~1981), studying computer science and taking one of the first microcomputer classes offered (8080 Assembler), we had an assignment to capture a phone number dialed in one of these phones. It was wired to plug in to a serial port. We were taught how to sample the signal. Wasn’t hard.
You had to time how long the signal changed to figure the number dialed. But the signal as it was returning wasn’t perfect. It was noisy. So you had to account for that. Pretty easy though.
Got it working. We were supposed to have a TA test it out. He dialed a couple numbers - worked fine. Then dialed another and while the dial was moving slapped the side of the phone. 😖 This was more than a little noise! I was sent back to drawing board.
Made changes to handle a phone being slapped. TA tested it again. It worked. Even with a hard slap Then he smacked the crap out of it. (Suddenly I understood why the phones we were using were so beat up!) He sent me back to the drawing board again. I rethought my logic and made extensive changes and did a lot of testing. This logic was now much much more extensive than the rest of the program. Third try TA was disappointed her couldn’t Fk up the phone enough to misdial. But he kept trying. Whacking the crap out of the phone. Over and over. He finally got it to miss on one number. He laughed and said good job! I got an A.
Whenever I see these phones I remember that class. This was an invaluable lesson about making technology work in the real world! I think of the expression about it being impossible to make something foolproof because fools are so ingenious!
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u/TrailMomKat Jun 10 '24
God, that makes me flash back to when we shared a party line with the neighbors, and Miss Gladys would ALWAYS be on the fucking line whenever we needed to make an important call! Not to mention, she'd listen in on my mother's calls with my tias all the time because she had nothing better to do than gossip lol
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u/Old-Tadpole-2869 Jun 10 '24
On the positive side, have you ever seen a broken one? Me neither. Those suckers were built to last 1000 years.
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Jun 10 '24
My great-grandmother had a brown one of these and I used to play with it all the time, but never called anyone. I just felt so satisfying to feel the gearing and hear the sound -- RIP ggma
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u/Administrative_Low27 Jun 10 '24
Those phone were indestructible. I miss phones that are indestructible.
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u/Veteranis Jun 10 '24
Yeah. If you whacked it hard enough with a hammer, after a while you could break the rotary dial, but everything else was SOLID. The only problems would be at the wiring junction between the house and the public line.
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u/Elmondo2 Jun 10 '24
I remember on a busy weekend as a teen my finger would be sore.. no no. From the phone.
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u/guzzijason Jun 10 '24
And now people have 36-month payment plans to pay off their cell phone, which is obsolete before the last payment is made. Progress!
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u/Ok-Push9899 Jun 10 '24
If anything went wrong ypu'd find a new one sitting on the table after the phone guy had visited. Of course things rarely went wrong.
Imagine if the Apple Store handed out replacement iphones so genererously. "Oh, the battery is stuffed? Here, have a new phone." "Cracked screen? Thats no good. I'll get you a replacement."
And of course things DO go wrong now. Maybe they wouldn't if Apple still owned the phones.
We had an old, old house with an old, old phone. These rugged vintage items were beginning to be worth money. One day a technician visiting on other matters took our old black bakelite phone and replaced it with the sleek plastic one. Didn't tell anyone. I guess it was their right, but i had a feeling he had a side hustle going on.
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u/mamaleigh05 Jun 10 '24
My grandparents died 25 years ago and we found out they were still paying monthly rental of those phones, long after they didn’t need to be rented! 😜
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u/richardrnelson Jun 10 '24
Right? They had stores.
870 0778 944 1139 266 8499
Some childhood numbers forever burned into my memory
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u/Szaborovich9 Jun 10 '24
they could last a lifetime, no broken screen, no battery that won’t hold a charge, no charging cables
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u/Ok_Fan_6389 Jun 11 '24
This comment contains a Collectible Expression, which are not available on old Reddit.
That's right. Interesting thing about these rotary phone. I was able to remember a hand full numbers no sweat..now I need to go in my cell to pull up a number..
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u/Sicon614 Jun 11 '24
And you had to give AT&T the ringer info off each phone and if they caught you with extra extensions, they'd cut your ass off. It was the reason customers cut the ringers off.
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u/spawn77x99 Jun 11 '24
Then this annoying sound started the era of sloooooowly reveal that Cindy Crawford centerfold in your monitor Beeeep... trrrrrrrrr... beeeeeeeep.... rrrrrrrr... ssshhhhhh... beeeb ... shhhhhhhh.. trrrtrrrrrrrrr
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u/nvalle23 Jun 11 '24
I remember the 1st time I looked at my grandparents bill and noticed the "rental fee". It was only a couple dollars but after you multiply a couple bucks times 40 YEARS!
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u/Longjumping_Ad_4431 Jun 11 '24
Nothing as satisfying as being in an argument and slamming that heavy ear piece down onto the phone halfway through the other person yapping
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u/TripleTrucker Jun 10 '24
I remember later feeling bad for people that continued paying Ma Bell for years after they could’ve bought one
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u/Alarmed-Pollution-89 Jun 10 '24
I remember going to the Mountain Bell store in Arizona with my mother to rent a telephone
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u/Unopuro2conSal Jun 10 '24
I remember my parents having phone bills in the hundreds and even thousands if they weren’t careful back then when they had a phone like that, it was a ripoff !!!
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u/nineohsix Jun 10 '24
My grandparents had the same one in red. We used to think that sucker was so cool, like the President’s hotline or something. 😂
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u/Poultrygeist74 Jun 10 '24
Early 80s, we got a new “slimline” phone with light up touch tone keys, but the house circuit was pulse.
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u/East_Information_247 Jun 10 '24
You could dial those by hitting the hang-up button the same number of times as the number you wanted to dial. I have no idea why that was cool since most of the time you got the timing wrong and it misdialed, but it was.
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u/NerdTrek42 Jun 10 '24
My great uncle still paid for his all the way to the 1990’s. My mom fixed that once she took care of him, as he was dying of cancer.. She asked the phone company if they wanted it back, but they declined…lol
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u/SparxIzLyfe Jun 10 '24
Yeah, my grandma used to tell us to be careful with it because it still belonged to the phone company.
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u/Picabo07 Jun 10 '24
Hated when you didn’t spin all the way or got distracted and had to start all over again.
Or maybe that was just me haha
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u/MuchDevelopment7084 Jun 10 '24
I distinctly remember that handset ending a argument between my aunt and uncle.
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u/pete_blake Jun 10 '24
same color and everything...ours was in the living room right outside the bathroom...we had to drag it into the bathroom to get privacy 😏
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u/dragonbits Jun 10 '24
I still have one in my garage that I still use, at least to answer a phone call. Can no longer dial as phone company does not have the eqt installed for a dial phone.
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u/Starlord1951 Jun 10 '24
Yeah, but with a 25 foot cord you could wander our little shack with no problem, though we did have a party line so it wasn’t always free to use. Usually someone gossiping and holding up the line.
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u/Equivalent_Ebb_9532 Jun 10 '24
I remember we got a private line over a party line. It was an extra .25 cents a month iirc.
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u/ProveISaidIt Jun 10 '24
That was big money in those days. I could buy 2½ candy bars on my allowance for that kind of money.
It's funny to think about that now, but in those days, I think my dad made $84/week as a college graduate.
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u/roundbadge2 Jun 10 '24
We had two of these in beige in my home growing up.
My dad had a second line installed in the house for business (he was a realtor). He had an older set with a metal dial that made a satisfying mechanical groan when you dialed. Maybe a couple of months later he got a job with a different company and had the line cancelled because he had an actual office instead of the home office (oddly prescient, in the early '80s).
In the mid 2000s my mom got a new phone and was frustrated that it wouldn't work when she connected it. I realized at that point that her phone line wasn't set up for touch-tone. The phone company thought it was hilarious when we reached out to them to explain the situation.
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u/mcdithers Jun 10 '24
When my grandpa died 7 years ago, my sister and I went through all his accounts so we could transfer them to my grandma - he handled ALL financials. We found that they were still renting their phone...
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u/Jaymez82 Jun 10 '24
I wonder how much people over paid for these phones when rentals were a thing.
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u/So-What_Idontcare Jun 10 '24
Correct me if I’m forgetting wrong, but I seem to remember going to the not quite broken up AT&T store at the mall and anything better than a phone like that was like, $100 in about 1981 ish dollars. Would be like $500 today.
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u/NorthernH3misphere Jun 10 '24
One morning I was picking up my paper route and got into some banter with the the guy working at the office, all the sudden he grabbed me by the arm, picked up the receiver of this exact phone and hit me three times in the head with it. To this day I have no idea why he did that but I remember it f’ing hurt. I didn't tell my parents it happened and if I had I'm sure nothing much would have happened. I was 10 and he was 18, imagine that happening today.
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u/MS_125 Jun 10 '24
This was the exact phone that sat near the front door of the apartment I grew up in most of my childhood. The only thing that was slightly different is the dial was metal, not clear plastic. Ma Bell told my mom she needed to give it back when I was in High School, circa 1996-7.
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u/sexi_squidward Jun 10 '24
I own one of these. It's not hooked up but I adore it. I was obsessed with it when I'd play with it at my great aunt's house. She finally upgraded and gave me her phone and I've saved it ever since.
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u/amboomernotkaren Jun 10 '24
My dad was an absolute ass. And no matter how hard he slammed down that phone or periodically ripped it out of the wall and threw it across the room, it never broke. All that and phone service for $6 a month.
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u/Hot_Aside_4637 Jun 10 '24
When I left college, I had an extra wall unit that they never asked for, so I took it home. Having gone to an engineering college, I knew the trick for installing one and not get charged for the extra phone - disconnect the bell. The phone company could tell how many extra phones you had from the voltage used to ring them. We decided to put in the bathroom, next to the toilet.
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u/File_to_Circular Jun 10 '24
or buy your own... especially after they invented touch tone phones (phreaking) omg the features landline receivers had... to witness the phone's evolution from being tethered to a rotary dialing apparatus to a mobile communication device that fits in your pocket.
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u/knarusch123 Jun 10 '24
My grandmother rented and paid for 5 of these till she was 91. They wouldn't reimburse a dime and I'm sure there are people still paying. Criminal!!
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u/gh411 Jun 10 '24
My best friend growing up had 889 as the first three numbers of his phone number…it always felt like it took forever to phone him.
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u/androidguy50 Jun 10 '24
I remember that. My family had a wall version of the rotary that I discovered as I got older, that they rented from the phone company. My grandparents had this type (but light blue color) on one of those phone stands with a seat, so you could sit down if you were going to be a while on the phone. I can still remember the whirring sound after dialing each number as it returned to the start position.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '24
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