Boston Globe Online / Nation | World / Pay phones to cost 50 cents as use falls
href="http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/251/nation/Pay_phones_to_cost_50_cents_as_use_falls+.shtml" title="the Boston Globe article">Pay
phones to cost 50 cents as use falls
(By
Michael Rosenwald, Globe Staff)
Verizon Communications responded
yesterday to a sharp drop in pay-phone usage by announcing that the price of
local calls will go up to 50 cents from 35 cents in most of the 33 states it
serves, including Massachusetts.
More insignifica. But you just know I've gotta complain. Only my complaint is not that they are raising the price of payphones -- please, they've always cost at least twice what we spend in phone change. That's the lot in life of a 'public utility', but the notion of promoting the commonweal by regulating such services as are considered necessary for the common good is fast becoming antique. And yet, even that is not my complaint. I may wax nostalgic for the monopoly days of Ma Bell and 10¢ phone calls, but nostalgia is not cause for complaint except when I am miserable or when I think I am about to die. Happily, neither is the case at the moment.
My complaint is that their excuse for doing it is a lie.
Without the rate increase, Verizon spokesman Jack Hoey said, the ''widespread availability of pay phones is threatened.''
''It's as simple as that,'' he said.
I have to smile. Poor folk, who have already endured the loss of "widespread availabality" of payphones, now have to stop being poor in order to use the few payphones which are left. The public payphone has long been acknowledged to be an albatross around the neck of the telecommunication industry and -- except for for those public utility regulations -- would only have existed in the form of that bane to social progress, the privately owned payphone. Verizon wants to transform that albatross into a 'pearl-necklace', and the public, not just their customers, are the ones getting jerked-off. "It's as simple as that.".
Now, in order to continue enduring this corporate impediment, and to (tongue in cheek) continue to provide the general public with reasonable access to the phone system, they are going transform the payphone -- a symbol of once egalitarian elements within the former Bell System -- into just another overpriced vending machine. (If they think there's a lot of vandalism to phones now, just wait. Poor boys pick their targets with unerring acuity.).
Complaint over. Hi ho, hi ho, off to work we go...
I like chiphi2x -- the name, the new design, and the person behind it all. From his journal:
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Yay!