Phone Booth Shenanigans
Whilst walking in Harare CBD past Causeway Post Office I noticed something which hadn’t fully clicked all the other countless times I have passed by… The payphone was intact, not functional but intact nonetheless…. Although the booth has seen better days and it might be of value for the Postal Authority to restore and preserve these time machines
Once upon a time a phone booth or a call box as we knew them was the hub of communication, before the era of mobile phones which are now permanently glued to our hands. I had trip down memory lane connecting with people who were familiar with the public call box… which are now all but defunct.
I grew up in home with a landline telephone so I was fortunate to not have experienced some of the awkward situations people faced when using a phone booth, given its limited privacy. In the home privacy wasn’t a luxury as well, you answered the phone while facing the nation which was your family, all eyes on you and afterwards might have to answer some inquisitive questions…
Back then, privacy wasnt such a big deal anyway… I mean the directory had your phone number and address listed in it for all and sundry to find (unless you specifically had it unlisted). You answered the phone by announcing your number, whose residence one had called and asking to whom they wished to speak.
I may or may not have looked up a crush’s home address by reverse searching their home landline telephone number through pages in the directory until I found theirs.. Fine, that could have been a bit stalkerish but I was a teen in love and I cant have been the only person that did that…
We now leave in an era where people are a couple of Google searches away from texting you from beneath your bed.
I became fully acquainted with the phone booth when I went off to boarding school, where I found myself joining the ranks in the queue to make a phone call home. Complaining about the atrocious treatment at a mission school, requests for pocket money and of course delivering an inventory of “stock” like how the juice was running out and if they could organise some more at their next visit…
That’s also when I learnt about my impatience at standing in queues, which should have prepared me for the queues I would have to wait in as an adult that I might as well as have been living in Queue Wait. Instead of using the phone booth during the day when it was crowded, I took to nocturnal visits to the phone booth. Those were not allowed and it meant sneaking around the school grounds like someone from the Impossible Mission Task Force.
I taught my family at home a secret code, that if the phone rang three times and went silent and repeated that 3 times that would mean they should call me back on the phone booth, which I would now have to myself cause not that many people were crazy enough to risk being caught outside.
The term they added a second phone booth which used prepaid cards was the best term of my life. See, most people had coins to use on the coin operated phone booth while I was one of the few people to get a prepaid calling card, which meant that fewer people used the card phone. For a bit there wasn’t need for the risky nocturnal shenanigans which weren’t entirely incident free, but that’s a tale for another time.
The prepaid card also offered an interesting business opportunity, one could charge people who had cash to use your card instead and use the less busy phone booth, for premium of course. Then there those who had no money at all but wanted to call home to request for pocket money and of course you let them use your calling card, in return for favours or settling the bill when their pocket money got sent over at prevailing lending rates, naturally…
I wonder what boarding school is like this days with almost every student hiding a smartphone beneath their pillow… they probably think they are super clever.
Life sure has a way of changing and yet staying exactly the same.
~B
Becoming The Muse 
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