What’s a pay phone?

“What’s a pet rock?”
“What are bellbottoms?”
“What’s VHS?”

The younger generations are wonderful aren’t they? Their seemingly innocent questions serve as a constant reminder that what was once special is now gone and that we are getting older, me included. (Hey, I’m familiar with VHS at least.)

The next question in our not-so-distant future: What is a pay phone?

AT&T has announced plans to hang up on the pay-phone business altogether by getting rid of its remaining 65,000 phones by 2008. Phone providers BellSouth and Qwest have already said their goodbyes to the dwindling business. AT&T’s increase to $.50 a call in 2001 could not overcome the losses due to the prevalence of wireless phones – or cell phones as we used to call them back in the day.

The Centers for Disease Control’s early release of estimates from its National Health Interview Survey on Wireless Substitution found that 12.6 percent, or 28 million adults, now have only a wireless phone in their household when it was just 5 percent of adults two years ago.

Some day, when phones are implanted in our heads, a whippersnapper will ask what a wireless phone is. And I won’t mind the day when someone asks me what reality television was.

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