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(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.PayPhone 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.PayPhone, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
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{{trope}}
[[File:
There was a time period where, in civilized countries everywhere, it was both possible and occasionally necessary to use a "public" telephone that required the insertion of change to make a call. These days, which spawned countless tropes, are [[Trope Breaker|essentially gone]]: As of May 23rd 2022, '''all''' pay phones have been removed from public property in New York City <ref>The last one [[It Belongs in a Museum|relocated to the Museum of the City of New York]]</ref>. [[Cell Phone|Cell phones]] are now so cheap almost anyone can afford them, so the only reason to use a pay phone is when you run out of battery or minutes (or you don't want the call to show up on your phone). Thus, the only places that have pay phones are ones with extremely high traffic, usually transient, where people either don't have a cell phone or don't want to use it, such as a bus depot, train station or airport, or places where cellphones are forbidden, such as hospitals.
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* Crucial calls that cannot be placed or are cut off too early for lack of sufficient change.
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** Routing a call through a taped-together pair of pay phones to make it "untraceable".
* Refusal by the anonymous stranger currently using the payphone to give it up in an "emergency", leading to a number of (almost always comical) common scenarios.
* Someone calling a pay phone, usually as the confused protagonist walks by and hears it ring. (This largely no longer works as the few remaining coin phones are most often for outgoing calls only.)
* Looking up someone's address on the phonebooks attached to the payphones and ripping out the page involved to have it. Almost inevitably, every phone book searched is missing the particular page because it was ripped out.
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* The [[Slice of Life]] [[Boys Love|BL]] manga ''Dear Green: Hitomi no Onowa'' is a little iffy about what decade the books set in for two out of three(/four) volumes, despite having been published in the mid-
* ''[[Psyren]]'' features pay phones pretty heavily in its plot. Those who answer a public phone and answer the questions posed are taken to the ruined world of Psyren, and the only way home is to find another phone at the opposite end of the playing field.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* In the ''[[Batman]]'' story of the "Penny Plunderer" (the one the giant penny in the Batcave comes from), the eponymous villain is caught at the end when he needs a nickel to call for help on a pay phone...and only has five pennies.
* In a ''[[Secret Six]]'' comic, [[Complete Monster|Junior]] is talking on a pay phone when a prostitute appears and demands to be allowed to use the phone, repeatedly yelling at [[Too Dumb to Live|the cloaked and menacing figure who is discussing torturing the person on the other end of the line]] that she, too, has rights and needs to use the phone ''this instant''. Things... do not end well for her
* In one issue of ''[[Transmetropolitan]]'' Spider uses a public [[Video Phone]] to contact Royce because he doesn't have a cell phone or one of the [[Brain
== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[Give My Regards to Broad Street]]'': policeman is making report of progress, or rather lack thereof, from cafeteria. He has to insert more money to keep the call going.
* Group Captain Mandrake is forced to use a pay phone to attempt to contact the President of the United States in the War Room towards the end of ''[[Dr. Strangelove]]'' because of a communications blackout at Burpleson Air Force Base. He doesn't quite have enough change, so he has Col. 'Bat' Guano shoot open a Coke machine in a scene with many memorable lines.
* In ''[[Fight Club]]'', after the Narrator's apartment is blown sky-high, he calls [[Love Interest|Marla]] on a payphone, then chickens out and hangs up without speaking to her. He then calls Tyler, a mysterious stranger he met on an airplane. Nobody answers, so the Narrator hangs
* In ''[[Amelie]]'', the main character, in a nearby cafe, calls a payphone next to a passer-by to make him walk into the phone booth and find a present she's left there for him.
* The central conceit of ''[[Phone Booth (film)|Phone Booth]]'' is that the main character is walking past the last phone booth in New York when it rings. Upon answering it, he finds himself trapped by a murderous sniper playing a sinister game.
* In ''[[Brick]]'', Brendan doesn't carry a cell phone and makes a habit of making and receiving calls via payphone. What makes this unusual is that the film was made in 2005 and is set in the present. Whether this is a function of the film's ''noir'' theme or just an idiosyncrasy of Brendan's is anyone's guess.
* In ''[[The Terminator]]'', the eponymous character wants to find Sarah Connor, and goes to a pay phone to look up her address. Finding it, the machine rips the page listing three women named Sarah Connor out of the phone book. [[Fridge Logic]] would ask why The Terminator wasn't able to just memorize three addresses.
== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[Neuromancer]]'' has one sequence where the protagonist walks past a bank of pay phones, and each one rings as he passes by. [[Science Marches On]] as the novel was written in 1984.
** Possibly justified, as it happens in an airport, which is one of the places where pay phones are still somewhat common.
== [[Live
* ''[[Are You Afraid of the Dark?]]
== [[Music]] ==
* The song "Sylvia's Mother" by [[Dr. Hook
* [[Ray Stevens]] deserves a mention
* "Operator" by [[Jim Croce]] is framed as a conversation between man on a pay phone and the long distance operator he's trying to get to help him place a call to a half-remembered number at which is the woman who left him. At the end of the song he decides he doesn't want to make the call after all, and tells the operator she can keep the dime for her trouble.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The [[Trope Breaker|Broken Trope]] nature of this was [[Lampshaded]] in ''[[Modern Warfare 2]]'' in the load up for the level "The Hornet's Nest" with this dialogue:
{{quote|
(Various news lines)
'''Soap:'''
* This was from where you got your mission briefings in the early ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' games, and slowly evaporated after ''GTA 3''. It makes for an odd bit of an [[Anachronism Stew]] since ''GTA 2'' is set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] yet there are no cell phones in sight, and in ''[[Vice City]]'' Tommy carries a cell phone regularly and only one mission giver uses the pay phones, despite the fact that it is canonically 1986.
* ''[[
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[[Category:Phone Tropes]]
[[Category:Pay Phone]]
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