New York’s Poor Weather Friend

Payphone

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Ben Cohen notes the sudden importance of pay phones:

On most days, New Yorkers breeze past corner pay phones with nary a glance. The devices are so foreign to many that the city’s official website has a question-and-answer section about pay phones in New York: Does anyone actually use them? “Even though the usage has gone way down,” it says, “the public pay telephones are still used for regular calls and long distance calls.” The last time Leslie Koch picked up a pay-phone receiver was during the 2003 blackout. Since then, she says, “I didn’t even know they were working.” But on Tuesday, old was new again, as her BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad and two laptops were idled. After calling her mother on Long Island from a pay phone, she commemorated the occasion by tweeting a photo of herself from Instagram [seen above].

But it’s not a perfect reunion:

With no electronic contacts at hand, [Oscar] Guzman, 34, had written down the phone numbers he needed on index cards. “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “The audio is awful.”

Jason Gilbert adds:

This is just months after New York announced a pilot program to convert several pay phones around in the city into free WiFi hotspots.

The move was widely praised as a successful effort to transform worthless technology — akin to “pagers, beepers, and busy signals,” as CNN’s Doug Gross put it in July — into something with actual utility. The Disneyland-like waiting lines that have popped up in New York show it might not be time to start uprooting all of those pay phones just yet.

Usually, when we talk about a smartphone becoming obsolete, we mean that a newer version has been released, making the technology available on the current model old-fashioned or quaint in comparison. In this case, however, we’re seeing smartphones become obsolete due to a total lack of utility outside of an oversized wristwatch — and one that, it must be said, cannot tell the time for very long.