The MTA was saved by the banks?

[R10 2952]

6 hours ago, Deucey said:

Amazing that I and my younger sister are the last generation that know how to call collect from pay phones or use phone & calling cards.

Speed talking to beat the beep is a lost language.

Lost for the under-20 crowd maybe; there's some things you don't forget, though.  They drilled it into my head as a kid that you need to dial 1 before the area code for long distance- hell, I still do it even today LOL...

Edited September 23, 2020 by R10 2952

[Deucey]

1 hour ago, R10 2952 said:

Lost for the under-20 crowd maybe; there's some things you don't forget, though.  They drilled it into my head as a kid that you need to dial 1 before the area code for long distance- hell, I still do it even today LOL...

I guess now you only know to dial “0 + 1” if you’re in prison.

[B35 via Church]

4 minutes ago, Deucey said:

I guess now you only know to dial “0 + 1” if you’re in prison.

Hopefully I won't ever have to worry about putting this into practice.

[R10 2952]

16 hours ago, Deucey said:

I guess now you only know to dial “0 + 1” if you’re in prison.

Not necessarily; that's how we figured out how to beat the phone system at our high school back in the day.

Edited September 23, 2020 by R10 2952
Confused work w/ school (time flies I guess)

[Deucey]

4 minutes ago, R10 2952 said:

Not necessarily; that's how we dialed out of work phones at one point.  Then they changed it to 9+1 at some point.

That's an internal switchboard - you probably have tielines or dial extensions to get to someone else inside the organization.

But do it on an outside landline phone and it's a collect call. That's the part I think folks who graduated high school after 2007 don't know.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Deucey

[bobtehpanda]

2 hours ago, Deucey said:

That's an internal switchboard - you probably have tielines or dial extensions to get to someone else inside the organization.

But do it on an outside landline phone and it's a collect call. That's the part I think folks who graduated high school after 2007 don't know.

When would you call collect?

I was certainly around when you could do it, I just never had a reason to do it.

I remember back when you had 7 digit dialing in the five boroughs. What a time.

[Deucey]

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

When would you call collect?

I was certainly around when you could do it, I just never had a reason to do it.

I remember back when you had 7 digit dialing in the five boroughs. What a time.

When you didn’t have change to pay for the pay phone, or the phone had a long distance or toll calling block.

(Toll calling and in-state long distance were a whole other way the Baby Bells screwed over customers.)

It was like this:

You could have old AT&T, MCI, or Sprint for your long distance calls, but that only applied if you were calling out of state. If you called in state but ~12 miles from your LATA (or neighborhood), the Baby Bells (NYNEX, Pacific Bell, BellSouth, et al) were your long distance carrier and charged you more than it’d cost to call out of state.

So if it cost you 10¢/minute to call Trenton or Philly from the Morrisania in the Bronx, NYNEX could charge you 25¢/minute to call Bay Ridge or Bed-Stuy on your house phone.

IIRC, NYNEX and Bell Atlantic didn’t charge if you called from NYC to Hoboken or JC, but you paid less calling Newark because that was an AT&T (or long distance) call.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Deucey
Examples given

[R10 2952]

Yeah it was a total ripoff; by contrast in Europe (West and East), most telecommunications services were run by the post office until the '80s/'90s- it was still a monopoly, but because it was public ownership they didn't nickel-and-dime people the way Bell Telephone did in America.

[Via Garibaldi 8]

On 9/22/2020 at 5:46 PM, bobtehpanda said:

Cursive doesn't really have a point other than signing in the modern era, and I barely use it for that (I was raised by people in medicine so I have a scrawly doctor's signature). I know my school offered ballpoint calligraphy as an art elective.

 

On 9/22/2020 at 6:26 PM, GojiMet86 said:

 

I learned cursive, too. But I really don't understand what the praise here is all about. Sounds more like reminiscing about the good old days, about how everything was better.

Cursive doesn't have a point now because we use computers mainly, but before such reliance, cursive was a way to write quicker. This was especially true for me in college in my lecture classes. Laptops were still relatively expensive at that time and you took notes in your classes by hand, so cursive was helpful.

Edited November 19, 2020 by Via Garibaldi 8

[CenSin]

On 11/19/2020 at 4:58 AM, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Cursive doesn't have a point now because we use computers mainly, but before such reliance, cursive was a way to write quicker. This was especially true for me in college in my lecture classes. Laptops were still relatively expensive at that time and you took notes in your classes by hand, so cursive was helpful.

Wait until speech-to-text gets better, then you won't even have to type. Stenography as a profession is also living on borrowed time. Heck, if you're looking for the old-fashioned cursive writing for greeting cards and other gifts, there is even a robot that does "handwritten" messages:

 

[B35 via Church]

23 minutes ago, CenSin said:

Wait until speech-to-text gets better, then you won't even have to type. Stenography as a profession is also living on borrowed time. Heck, if you're looking for the old-fashioned cursive writing for greeting cards and other gifts, there is even a robot that does "handwritten" messages:

**youtube clip **

So if every single person on this forum were to sign a contract using this handy little contraption, we'd all have the same signature.... Cool !

[bobtehpanda]

1 hour ago, B35 via Church said:

So if every single person on this forum were to sign a contract using this handy little contraption, we'd all have the same signature.... Cool !

You don't even need that.

I signed my last apartment lease online and you clicked a signature to sign, verified by email. There was no paper copy.

[B35 via Church]

25 minutes ago, bobtehpanda said:

You don't even need that.

I signed my last apartment lease online and you clicked a signature to sign, verified by email. There was no paper copy.

Ridiculous.