Guess Where I'm Calling From?

It used to be that if you wanted to reach out and touch someone, there was a certain amount of strategizing. Making a phone call used to be more of a challenge before we started carrying telephones around in our pockets, purses, or wedged into our ears. Not that I'm not impressed by all of this portable technology. I really am. It just takes all the adventure away.
When I was a lad, phones were attached to walls by "cords." You couldn't just walk around wherever you wanted while you talked. With the exception of those fifty foot long umbilicals made popular by Marlo Thomas in "That Girl," if you answered the phone in the bedroom, that's where you had your conversation. Or maybe you were lucky enough to have more than one extension, in which case it would be a matter of yelling across the house: "Can you hang up in there? I'm trying to use the phone!" Of course, finding the phone was a lot easier back then. You just followed the cord.
Then there was the omnipresent pay phone. There used to be banks of pay phones in airports, shopping centers, and street corners across this great land of ours. I had a friend in high school who saw it as his personal mission to make a call from most any of these conveniently located devices, and before he finished, he would always give the receiver one really good whack against the counter or the wall, and then before he hung up, he'd let me know, "Nope, still works just fine." He was a one-man quality control service.
Nowadays it's more difficult than it's ever been. Back in December 2007, AT&T got out of the payphone business for good. Over the past ten years, the number of public telephones in the United States has dropped from two million to one million. Up the street from me is a pay phone that doesn't look like anyone has used it for months - probably because the handset has been snapped into three distinct pieces, the wired inside hold the bits tenuously together. I thought I should grab my cell phone and give my friend a call to see if this was his handiwork, but I had left my phone at home.