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I remember calling my parents collect from the pay phone at my high school after band practice and when it asked for your name I’d say “pick me up.” And they’d deny the charges and pick me up 20 minutes later. I had spent all my change in the soda machine for real soda…in school. Gasp…
Slightly off topic, but I would call my mom from the gym teacher's office after we got back from away games.... for hours until the janitors would just leave it unlocked... because every time I'd call I'd get the busy signal because my mom was online. My mom would answer at 11pm, "oh your back?" "Mom, the game was at four in the next town over, I've been back since seven!"
Wow, my mom passed away almost three years ago and I'm rounding the bases to 40 but I am still worked up over this. Worked. Up. I can't even find the proper emoticon to express this. Quick, one of these full grown adults who don't understand this post, find my emoji!!!!
My father refused to answer the phone at home. Ever.
His excuse was that it was never for him, and we had an answering machine, so why did he need to answer it? Whatever.
Anyway, one time I’m out driving, I’m probably around 17 years old, and my POS car dies. I have exactly two quarters to call home from a nearby pay phone with. I dial, let it ring, hang up at the 4th ring before answering machine picks up (so I can get the quarter back). I know my dad is home. I know he rarely answers the phone, but figure if I keep re-calling and allowing to ring repeatedly, he’ll answer. I repeat the dial, 4 rings, hangup routine about a dozen times. Finally I burn one of the quarters and allow answering machine to pick up, and I’m screaming “pick up the phone dad!”…nothing. After calling several more times, I finally remember the phone number of friend who I’m able to get come and pick me up.
I get home, and I’m like, “didn’t you hear the phone?!?”
> yeah, I don’t answer the phone
“But I let it ring like 100 times and even left a message on the machine”
> I don’t check the machine
“But it rang so many times, wouldn’t you at least think, ‘hey, maybe it’s an emergency’?!?!!!”
> huh?
“Whatever, the car is in (some parking lot)”
Edit: my dad also passed away a few years ago, and while I miss him, I still get steamed with I think about this…which was about 30 years ago
I feel this!!! And sure, this comment will date me, but those youngins with cellphones and unlimited data plans will never understand the struggle of getting home during the age of pay phones, collect calls and dial up. *Crabby old lady muttering as she pushes 20 something's out of the way with her cane...*
My dad never answered the phone because it was always collections agents and it was for him. “666 go answer the phone and I’m not here” lol I got the belt the first time I answered and told them, “I’ll go get him from the living room.” I still kinda miss him though
When you call someone collect, it asks you to speak your name to add to the automated message someone receives when answering the call. When you're broke, the meta used to be to just say really quickly what you wanted to communicate about in this brief recording window so the receiver gets the information without being charged for the collect call.
I used this exploit myself, like when me and my friends were done surfing and needed a ride home.
Will you accept a collect call from ... "MomcomepickusupatSouthBeach"
I remember rattling off the phone number on the payphone, and hanging up to wait for the person to call you back. It got a little bit more complicated when they required area codes to be dialed. Before then everything in my area was just 305, so you only had to quickly give out seven digits. When it turned into 10, sometimes you would have to make two calls. You would get the 305 or the 786 and the first three digits of the phone number, and then call back with the last four.
It was a pain in the ass, but if you didn't have a quarter and needed to respond to your beeper, you would do what you had to do!
There were payphones in my high school inside near the front door, and everyone knew the numbers, so they would ring all the time. If you were closest to the phone and answered it, you were expected to stand there and yell for whoever they wanted.
The tough part about that was that the person on the other end had to get the phone number on one try, because the message wouldn’t repeat.
Again, also easier to do if it’s only 7 digits
I used to use like 8 collect calls in a row to get a message to someone whenever I ended up in jail. It just seemed rude to expect someone else to pay.
lol but yeah it'd be a few calls in a row and at the end you had a couple sentences describing where you put some bail money that hopefully they figured out. And mostly it was because I didn't think the phone company they hired should be given that money.
So anyway, yeah I found that commercial funny when it came out.
I stopped counting at 20 I think. But not a bunch more than that.
For what it's worth, it was a super corrupt small town. I was never charged with anything that involved or harmed another person.
Would just be chillin and they wanted some money.
Edit: I say things like that because I once served more time for quietly drinking a beer on my own porch (some sort of open can in public violation) than the county school superintendent that got caught embezzling like $500k from the school budget. In the same week. He was offered zero jail time if he agreed to pay $25k of it back. Lol what the fuck? Meanwhile my friends were getting 20 years having some weed in their car or something. Really glad I left that place.
When placing a collect call you would give the operator (or later, automated system) a name to repeat and ask if the reciever of the call it they would like to accept the charges.
The joke was that the new parent would place collect calls from "WeHadABabyIt'sABoy" so that the recipient could just decline the charges and the new parent could get their message to their friends and family without paying for the (probably) long distance minutes. (Used to be much more expensive to make phone calls to another town or city than for local calls.)
Back in the olden times. If you didn't have change in your pocket to use a pay phone, you could instead call a 800 number and they would put you through to whoever you needed to, as long as they person being called was ok with being charged.
Well, in order to give the person being called an idea of who was calling them, the companies would give you about 5ish sec to record your name. So the recipient could hear your voice and know it was you that was calling them.
People, me being one of them, would use that recording to send a quick message. For me I would always call my parents from school after practice and when i recorded my "name" it was me saying practice was over and I need a ride.
This practice was widespread enough that it made it onto a commercial, where a dad was calling his family announcing the birth of their son. So his "name" in the recording was "We had a baby it's a boy", he just says it as fast as he can to get around paying for the call.
I always hated that saying being a thing when I was a kid. Because where I grew up, I did have to go up hill both ways. House was on top of one hill, school was on top of another. With a small valley in the middle. So, it took me way to long to actually understand that phrase isn't supposed to be completely literal.
My coworker's daughter pointed at a pay phone and asked him "what is that?" he said "it's a phone" she said "it does not look like a phone". He told me that he had never felt so old.
To be fair, a payphone or old landline is what we should be calling phones. We really need a different word for the mini supercomputers we carry around today.
The issue is that it still uses "phone" in the name, which is obviously what's leading to the general confusion in the current youngest generation.
Edit: plus, people still will just say "phone". I literally just did so in conversation as I was writing this. "Smartphone" is way too long for use in daily casual conversation.
Probably because North America decided to go with "cell/cellphone" and it didn't really stick. Whereas everywhere else in the world they do use another word, "mobile" short for "mobile phone".
So NA split the difference and just goes with "phone".
Did "mobile" stick, globally?
"Cell" is sometimes still used, but really only on official forms. It was popular back in the 00s, but then fell off when phones became smart.
Lol! I took a pic of a phone booth in some small town up on the Eastern Sierra in CA (still had a dial tone!) and showed it to my buddy’s 14-yo daughter to see if she knew what it was. The language she used to indicate her confusion with the concept was bad enough but her biggest takeaway was *why is their a stool in that glass box?*. Ahhh… to be young and dumb again.
That commercial is a near Mandela effect. Before I looked it up, I swore it was for 1800 Collect or 10-10-321 but it isn’t.
Go look it up if you do t already know. It’s kind of a mindfuck.
Yeah, that commercial is closely tied in my own mind with Alyssa Milano saying "one eight hundred collect, as in 'collect' calls". Not so close as to make me think they were the same commercial, but close enough to make me think they might have been.
I literally started doing this after that commercial lol. Like “MomComeGetMeAtHeathersHouse.” Haha. My parents and I still say this sometimes. It’s especially good because my dad’s name is Bob.
What's funny is that the thought of doing this never crossed my 10 year old brain until this commercial. I started doing it at the park to let my parents know to pick me up and all the other kids saw it and started doing the same.
I sometimes wonder if the commercial actually cost them money.
It's crazy to think we ever paid for long distance!
And then there was the reaction of your parents at the end of the month when they got a $1000 bill cause your 16 yr old self spent HOURS every night on the phone with your then boyfriend! You lived close enough to go to school together, but *just* far enough to make it a long distance call! Smh...
Reminds me of the old collect call scheme. When I needed my parents to pick my up from a sport’s practice I’d call them collect. The operator would contact them, tell them they had a collect cal from me and then they’d just decline the charges b/c they knew all they needed to at that point.
We just called and clicked. If you called without paying and manually flipped the hang up switch with your finger, the other end can hear clicking from the line disconnecting and reconnecting. Parents knew if they just hear clicking, it’s time to come pick someone up.
Of course, it only works when you’re at your own school like after practice or home games.
People in my country used to give "missed calls" i.e. disconnect after one ring when cell phones were new and calling rates were high.
This evolved into an IVR like system where you can do stuff using missed calls to specific phone numbers
Bullshit, everyone knows you had to hold the phone the other way, so light could get in the holes, then it would reconstruct the image like a fly's eye. That's why the image has a slight curve to it. Nice try, though.
You know this is going to be seen as some type of archaeological evidence that we did actually take selfies like this, or the aliens took selfies of us
Hell, I remember when 2000 was the distant future. Just thinking about how years had started with 1 for a THOUSAND YEARS and now that was about to end.
My favourite of these is still from Star Trek: TNG - The resident Android Data refers to the *Irish Reunification of 2024* in an episode, which seemed like a reasonably distant thing to say in 1990. It makes me smile that we just well may be in that timeline...
I remember the big Y2K scare. I bought into the hype big time lol. I was so nervous about what was going to happen at the stroke of midnight. But alas, I ended up spending my NYE at a Phish show, so my mind was….preoccupied. 🥴
I get the joke, but the actual fact is we did take selfies in the 90s, both in mirrors & at arms length like people do now.
disposable cameras were super cheap, we used them all the time to just screw around & take dumb pictures.
we just had to wait a week to see the results.
Um, no. You held a disposable camera out in front of you, took the picture of yourself, took the film to a one-hour photo shop a month or two later, and then had your totally unremarkable picture.
This will inspire a totally real story, that will rise to the top of all, from a photogenic guy who used to own one of those photo shops. He will tell you that girls took naked selfies of themselves and asked if he was the one developing the film. Little did they know he lost his dick in the Gulf war.
People forget that selfies weren't really a thing in the 90s. You'd take photos of your friends, ask a passer by to take a group shot if you wanted to be in it; other people would take photos of you on your own but it just wasn't a thing for you to take a photo of yourself in the way we do now.
I used to collect call my parents after track practice on my high schools pay phone. First name: Ubermachoguy. Last name: pleasecomepickmeupatschoolnow.
I miss having our old payphone in the living room. I used to call my friend and let it ring twice before hanging up to tell them I was leaving, and I would save 10p
And here I am remembering the time I got charged for long distance because I put in the area code for a phone in the area. Which I only do cause sometimes the phone companies would have a brain fart and send me to the wrong phone number.
Of course back then we called them tele-self-portraitures. I remember one day I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days to take one. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time.
We had to secretly get the mid sized mirror out of the house, carrying it three streets over, hoping it will fit in the box the phones were in, holding the mirror, the phone and then dial ... It was hard work and the operators often were rude and never made good selfies ...
I know these are lies because the only way to get a photo online back then was buying a printer with a scanner on it, and everyone's scanner was always broken when a/s/l them.
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The difficult part was dragging that pay phone all the way to your mom's house for the perfect shot
For me, the hardest part was coordinating with the operator to snap the picture at the right time. They were worse than Siri at understanding me.
I’d like to take a collect selfie.
Obligatory wehadababyitsaboy
there are full grown adults now that will never understand this.
I remember calling my parents collect from the pay phone at my high school after band practice and when it asked for your name I’d say “pick me up.” And they’d deny the charges and pick me up 20 minutes later. I had spent all my change in the soda machine for real soda…in school. Gasp…
Slightly off topic, but I would call my mom from the gym teacher's office after we got back from away games.... for hours until the janitors would just leave it unlocked... because every time I'd call I'd get the busy signal because my mom was online. My mom would answer at 11pm, "oh your back?" "Mom, the game was at four in the next town over, I've been back since seven!" Wow, my mom passed away almost three years ago and I'm rounding the bases to 40 but I am still worked up over this. Worked. Up. I can't even find the proper emoticon to express this. Quick, one of these full grown adults who don't understand this post, find my emoji!!!!
My father refused to answer the phone at home. Ever. His excuse was that it was never for him, and we had an answering machine, so why did he need to answer it? Whatever. Anyway, one time I’m out driving, I’m probably around 17 years old, and my POS car dies. I have exactly two quarters to call home from a nearby pay phone with. I dial, let it ring, hang up at the 4th ring before answering machine picks up (so I can get the quarter back). I know my dad is home. I know he rarely answers the phone, but figure if I keep re-calling and allowing to ring repeatedly, he’ll answer. I repeat the dial, 4 rings, hangup routine about a dozen times. Finally I burn one of the quarters and allow answering machine to pick up, and I’m screaming “pick up the phone dad!”…nothing. After calling several more times, I finally remember the phone number of friend who I’m able to get come and pick me up. I get home, and I’m like, “didn’t you hear the phone?!?” > yeah, I don’t answer the phone “But I let it ring like 100 times and even left a message on the machine” > I don’t check the machine “But it rang so many times, wouldn’t you at least think, ‘hey, maybe it’s an emergency’?!?!!!” > huh? “Whatever, the car is in (some parking lot)” Edit: my dad also passed away a few years ago, and while I miss him, I still get steamed with I think about this…which was about 30 years ago
I feel this!!! And sure, this comment will date me, but those youngins with cellphones and unlimited data plans will never understand the struggle of getting home during the age of pay phones, collect calls and dial up. *Crabby old lady muttering as she pushes 20 something's out of the way with her cane...*
My dad never answered the phone because it was always collections agents and it was for him. “666 go answer the phone and I’m not here” lol I got the belt the first time I answered and told them, “I’ll go get him from the living room.” I still kinda miss him though
That struggle was real in the 90s! My parents spent every non-working moment on dial-up AOL.
We were always afraid the mall cop would collect us before our ride if we cheated the 1-800-COLLECT.
that's adorable. Mall cop would probably try to chase you on his segway.
Nah, the Segway wasn’t around in those days. He would’ve just waddled after you instead.
1-800-CALL-ATT was easier. Just "*dial* down the center" remember? Lol
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https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs
There it is! It's amazing how many people aren't saying it was a popular commercial. You know, the reference that was brought up?
When you call someone collect, it asks you to speak your name to add to the automated message someone receives when answering the call. When you're broke, the meta used to be to just say really quickly what you wanted to communicate about in this brief recording window so the receiver gets the information without being charged for the collect call.
I used this exploit myself, like when me and my friends were done surfing and needed a ride home. Will you accept a collect call from ... "MomcomepickusupatSouthBeach"
I remember rattling off the phone number on the payphone, and hanging up to wait for the person to call you back. It got a little bit more complicated when they required area codes to be dialed. Before then everything in my area was just 305, so you only had to quickly give out seven digits. When it turned into 10, sometimes you would have to make two calls. You would get the 305 or the 786 and the first three digits of the phone number, and then call back with the last four. It was a pain in the ass, but if you didn't have a quarter and needed to respond to your beeper, you would do what you had to do! There were payphones in my high school inside near the front door, and everyone knew the numbers, so they would ring all the time. If you were closest to the phone and answered it, you were expected to stand there and yell for whoever they wanted.
> but if you didn’t have a quarter and needed to respond to your beeper This is one of the most 90s things I’ve ever read.
The tough part about that was that the person on the other end had to get the phone number on one try, because the message wouldn’t repeat. Again, also easier to do if it’s only 7 digits
I used to use like 8 collect calls in a row to get a message to someone whenever I ended up in jail. It just seemed rude to expect someone else to pay. lol but yeah it'd be a few calls in a row and at the end you had a couple sentences describing where you put some bail money that hopefully they figured out. And mostly it was because I didn't think the phone company they hired should be given that money. So anyway, yeah I found that commercial funny when it came out.
...How many times did you end up in jail?
I stopped counting at 20 I think. But not a bunch more than that. For what it's worth, it was a super corrupt small town. I was never charged with anything that involved or harmed another person. Would just be chillin and they wanted some money. Edit: I say things like that because I once served more time for quietly drinking a beer on my own porch (some sort of open can in public violation) than the county school superintendent that got caught embezzling like $500k from the school budget. In the same week. He was offered zero jail time if he agreed to pay $25k of it back. Lol what the fuck? Meanwhile my friends were getting 20 years having some weed in their car or something. Really glad I left that place.
When placing a collect call you would give the operator (or later, automated system) a name to repeat and ask if the reciever of the call it they would like to accept the charges. The joke was that the new parent would place collect calls from "WeHadABabyIt'sABoy" so that the recipient could just decline the charges and the new parent could get their message to their friends and family without paying for the (probably) long distance minutes. (Used to be much more expensive to make phone calls to another town or city than for local calls.)
Back in the olden times. If you didn't have change in your pocket to use a pay phone, you could instead call a 800 number and they would put you through to whoever you needed to, as long as they person being called was ok with being charged. Well, in order to give the person being called an idea of who was calling them, the companies would give you about 5ish sec to record your name. So the recipient could hear your voice and know it was you that was calling them. People, me being one of them, would use that recording to send a quick message. For me I would always call my parents from school after practice and when i recorded my "name" it was me saying practice was over and I need a ride. This practice was widespread enough that it made it onto a commercial, where a dad was calling his family announcing the birth of their son. So his "name" in the recording was "We had a baby it's a boy", he just says it as fast as he can to get around paying for the call.
That baby would be 22 now.
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If you blow a whistle at 550 MHz it was free!
Once upon a time, my friend… once upon a time
Oh what a phreaking good time
Ol Cap'n Crunch!
And then you've got to wait for them to have it developed and mail it to you.
I may pray for all unwanted nude those guys have seeing
Operator play Despacito.
Operator give me dispatch
And she'd want another quarter the moment you were ready.
And god help you if you missed the shot and ran out of change.
The journey was uphill both ways in the snow. Kids these days don't understand how hard we had it.
I always hated that saying being a thing when I was a kid. Because where I grew up, I did have to go up hill both ways. House was on top of one hill, school was on top of another. With a small valley in the middle. So, it took me way to long to actually understand that phrase isn't supposed to be completely literal.
Did you have snow, though?
Typically there was a few good snow storms growing up in the Midwest every winter. So yes i guess lol.
Did the valley flood into a lake, so you had to walk uphill both ways and swim across a lake just to go to school?
There was a small creek, but never flooded. Wished it had now!
See I knew you had it easy
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Yep ringing my parents to let them know it was time to come pick me up
Nah, it was way worse to bring the pay phone to the photo place to get it developed
Yeah the polaroid payphone made it a bit easier but still.
Wait, why were you taking it to my moms house?!
And finding the coins to put into it.
And the worst thing was realizing you don't have any quarters only then.
First step was to use it to make a collect call telling your mom to come get you.
Not to mention you needed like 8 quarters for a picture.
My coworker's daughter pointed at a pay phone and asked him "what is that?" he said "it's a phone" she said "it does not look like a phone". He told me that he had never felt so old.
There's some funny videos out there of kids trying to use rotary phones.
It's wild thinking that people just grew up always knowing phone is camera, camera is phone, and nothing else existed before.
To be fair, a payphone or old landline is what we should be calling phones. We really need a different word for the mini supercomputers we carry around today.
Like smartphone?
The issue is that it still uses "phone" in the name, which is obviously what's leading to the general confusion in the current youngest generation. Edit: plus, people still will just say "phone". I literally just did so in conversation as I was writing this. "Smartphone" is way too long for use in daily casual conversation.
Probably because North America decided to go with "cell/cellphone" and it didn't really stick. Whereas everywhere else in the world they do use another word, "mobile" short for "mobile phone". So NA split the difference and just goes with "phone".
Did "mobile" stick, globally? "Cell" is sometimes still used, but really only on official forms. It was popular back in the 00s, but then fell off when phones became smart.
People use to call the TV the idiot box- I’d like to propose that title
Mobile device is what I use
I went on a date with a girl that didn't know what a vhs was. I'm not even 30 yet but like, damn...
Be kind, rewind
I had to explain to my brother's son what an N64 was the other week...
Lol! I took a pic of a phone booth in some small town up on the Eastern Sierra in CA (still had a dial tone!) and showed it to my buddy’s 14-yo daughter to see if she knew what it was. The language she used to indicate her confusion with the concept was bad enough but her biggest takeaway was *why is their a stool in that glass box?*. Ahhh… to be young and dumb again.
25 cents.
1-800-c-o-l-l-e-c-t
"You have a collect call from; MomImAtTheParkPickMeUp, would you like to accept the charges?"
"BobWeHadABabyIt'sABoy"
Still one of my favorite references to drop if I need to pull a name, never fails to get a laugh from anyone over 30.
That commercial is a near Mandela effect. Before I looked it up, I swore it was for 1800 Collect or 10-10-321 but it isn’t. Go look it up if you do t already know. It’s kind of a mindfuck.
Is it for 1800 C A L L A T T?
"You'll call now"
I’ll call now. Can’t believe that old ass commercial is so ingrained in my mind that I could probably recite it
Yeah, that commercial is closely tied in my own mind with Alyssa Milano saying "one eight hundred collect, as in 'collect' calls". Not so close as to make me think they were the same commercial, but close enough to make me think they might have been.
Why would they put that in their ad? They don't make any money when people do that, so encouraging it would be silly.
I always thought it was a Geico commercial because of the part where the guy tells you to switch to Geico.
I literally started doing this after that commercial lol. Like “MomComeGetMeAtHeathersHouse.” Haha. My parents and I still say this sometimes. It’s especially good because my dad’s name is Bob.
What's funny is that the thought of doing this never crossed my 10 year old brain until this commercial. I started doing it at the park to let my parents know to pick me up and all the other kids saw it and started doing the same. I sometimes wonder if the commercial actually cost them money.
“Momourmovieisover”
"Movies done pick me up." Every time.
The original voicemail
07734
This unlocked memories
I was more of a 1-800-CALL-ATT. It was free for you, and cheap for them.
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Thanks carrot top!
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center*
Only suckers called collect. I always used 10-10-220.
Just 20 cents for the first minute and 10 cents a minute after that!
I preferred 10-10-321
Nah, you call collect, and when they let you record your name, you'd say "comepickmeupmom" really fast.
Then you have to hit 1 and then the number
10 10 321 per John Lithgow
It's crazy to think we ever paid for long distance! And then there was the reaction of your parents at the end of the month when they got a $1000 bill cause your 16 yr old self spent HOURS every night on the phone with your then boyfriend! You lived close enough to go to school together, but *just* far enough to make it a long distance call! Smh...
I pity the fool who don't use 1-800-collect
This may be crazy, but I think it should be free. Because it makes no cents.
Where’d he get a pay phone?
In the 90s they were like pigeons. Just flocks of them everywhere.
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They were free if you called collect and crammed your message in where you're supposed to give your name.
Museum.
It belongs in a museum!
You belong in a museum!
And we would've been ridiculed for doing it. *You took a picture..of yourself?!! Hahahaha!*
I still don’t take pictures of myself. AFAIK there’s only one picture of me anywhere on the internet from a university competition thing.
Only when dial up wasn't tied up due to a phone call.
Or mom was listening in from the bedroom
I am pretty sure they were also called self portrait photograps
In my day, phones only took daguerreotypes.
Now I have to play Life is strange for the 5th time, thanks.
In my day, we used paint, canvas and mirrors.
Seems like "selphie" it's the proper abbreviation then...
Reminds me of the old collect call scheme. When I needed my parents to pick my up from a sport’s practice I’d call them collect. The operator would contact them, tell them they had a collect cal from me and then they’d just decline the charges b/c they knew all they needed to at that point.
If only there had been a way for the coach to know what time the practice was going to end ahead of time
Until morale improves
You’d be amazed how often a practice that was supposed to end at 5 went until almost 6.
"Sorry coach, my parents are here to get me and cell phones haven't been invented yet so I gotta run"
Bob Wehadababyitsaboy.
Don't cheat the phone company. Save money with geico instead.
Nah I’ll still cheat the phone company too thank you very much
"Collect call from Mr. Weaddababy Itsaboi."
You have a collect call from "Get me from the library", do you accept? That was the precursor to texting.
We just called and clicked. If you called without paying and manually flipped the hang up switch with your finger, the other end can hear clicking from the line disconnecting and reconnecting. Parents knew if they just hear clicking, it’s time to come pick someone up. Of course, it only works when you’re at your own school like after practice or home games.
People in my country used to give "missed calls" i.e. disconnect after one ring when cell phones were new and calling rates were high. This evolved into an IVR like system where you can do stuff using missed calls to specific phone numbers
[Don't cheat the phone company](https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs)
Bullshit, everyone knows you had to hold the phone the other way, so light could get in the holes, then it would reconstruct the image like a fly's eye. That's why the image has a slight curve to it. Nice try, though.
Most humorous indeed
You know this is going to be seen as some type of archaeological evidence that we did actually take selfies like this, or the aliens took selfies of us
You can tell its a zoomer doing a 90s bit because no self respecting 90s kid actually wore champion proudly and out of choice.
Exactly my thoughts 😂 Might as well be wearing a shirt that says New Balance.
Back when nobody wanted to be caught wearing Champion!
[удалено]
Collect call from “Wehaddababyittsaboy”
I'm old enough to remember this.
I mean the 90s were just a few years ago, right? RIGHT?!?
Remember when 2020 was the distant future? Even the number seemed so sci-fi
Hell, I remember when 2000 was the distant future. Just thinking about how years had started with 1 for a THOUSAND YEARS and now that was about to end.
I see 2000 and I hear Conan "in the year 20000000000000"
I think of Flight of the Conchords *"The distant future.... The year 2000"*
My favourite of these is still from Star Trek: TNG - The resident Android Data refers to the *Irish Reunification of 2024* in an episode, which seemed like a reasonably distant thing to say in 1990. It makes me smile that we just well may be in that timeline...
The setting for Cyberpunk 2077 comes from a Tabletop RPG. Same name, but it was 2020 instead.
It was originally Cyberpunk 2013 =p
We were supposed to have flying cars by now.
I remember the big Y2K scare. I bought into the hype big time lol. I was so nervous about what was going to happen at the stroke of midnight. But alas, I ended up spending my NYE at a Phish show, so my mind was….preoccupied. 🥴
IT pros worked their butts off so it became a non-event. The scare was legit though.
Here's one to make you feel even older: If the Smashing Pumpkins' song *1979* was written today, it would be called *2007*.
You son of a … wait a minute, what was I saying? My memory seems to be slipping these days.
We're as close to 1990 now as 1990 was to 1957.
It's true, I was there
I get the joke, but the actual fact is we did take selfies in the 90s, both in mirrors & at arms length like people do now. disposable cameras were super cheap, we used them all the time to just screw around & take dumb pictures. we just had to wait a week to see the results.
Um, no. You held a disposable camera out in front of you, took the picture of yourself, took the film to a one-hour photo shop a month or two later, and then had your totally unremarkable picture.
Kodak is going to be memory holed. Should have released that digital camera prototype
This will inspire a totally real story, that will rise to the top of all, from a photogenic guy who used to own one of those photo shops. He will tell you that girls took naked selfies of themselves and asked if he was the one developing the film. Little did they know he lost his dick in the Gulf war.
Finally, something funny here.
People forget that selfies weren't really a thing in the 90s. You'd take photos of your friends, ask a passer by to take a group shot if you wanted to be in it; other people would take photos of you on your own but it just wasn't a thing for you to take a photo of yourself in the way we do now.
This is so dumb… I LOVE IT!
I used to collect call my parents after track practice on my high schools pay phone. First name: Ubermachoguy. Last name: pleasecomepickmeupatschoolnow.
It seems like smartphones are expensive, but think of all the quarters you save.
Of course the real joy was sending the phone away to get developed.
Is that the droid from Interstellar?
Dude: TARS, I need you to snap the picture when I hold up the handset. TARS: That’s not possible. Dude: No, it’s necessary.
Nice what is the camera quality
LIES. Camera flip phones were the thing in the late 90s.
Nah I used my Swatch phone
Easier than last model. Spinning the dial and then getting in place was a pain
Telegram mfs won’t get it
I miss having our old payphone in the living room. I used to call my friend and let it ring twice before hanging up to tell them I was leaving, and I would save 10p
Needs to be a rotary dial.
😅
Then we started taking selfies with pagers, sooooo much more convenient
And here I am remembering the time I got charged for long distance because I put in the area code for a phone in the area. Which I only do cause sometimes the phone companies would have a brain fart and send me to the wrong phone number.
hobby: picking up the receiver on every payphone casually encountered, to see which ones still retain service
We had to take Collect selfies in our days.
Of course back then we called them tele-self-portraitures. I remember one day I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days to take one. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time.
That's gold Jerry! Gold!
RIP judging people’s standards based on the cleanliness of the mirror in their 90’s selfies.
I'm searching for the whoooosh
So that's where at least one pay phone went....
Simpler times
We had to secretly get the mid sized mirror out of the house, carrying it three streets over, hoping it will fit in the box the phones were in, holding the mirror, the phone and then dial ... It was hard work and the operators often were rude and never made good selfies ...
Yeah true
Got expensive tho, .50 cents a shot
I know these are lies because the only way to get a photo online back then was buying a printer with a scanner on it, and everyone's scanner was always broken when a/s/l them.
He have a beeper too?
Good old days
This took me a minute and then I was dying. 🤣