Buttons and Bells of the Kiosks

I always remind my neighbour from the housing estate I grew up on, that one time the people of the terrace had to share the telephone at the end of the road.  Nowadays practically all of those people have phones in their pockets.

Telephone and Phonebooth
at Derryglad Museum, Curraghboy, Co. Roscommon
 

The first time I used the telephone kiosk at the end of Assumption Road in Athlone was sometime in the late 70's.  My now deceased mother had asked me to ring the television repair people.  In those days most people were renting televisions, and there always seemed to be loads of breakdowns.
She told me the details on how to make a phonecall from a callbox.  She explained that I had to lift the receiver, put in ten pence (I think that's how much it was then), dial the number on the circular dial, wait for a response, and when that is received, then press a button with the letter A on it.  It was important she said, not to push button A until the person I was calling responded.  If they didn't respond, then and only then, should I push a button with B on it, which would cause the money to drop back to me into a slot.
There was a queue of about four or five people outside the box before I went in, and while I was inside another queue gathered up.  The callbox serviced almost a dozen housing estates, so queues were inevitable.
I could just about reach up to dial the numbers on the telephone dial.
I was proud as punch when I made my first call, and everything went well.  I did as my mother told me, with the tenpence and Button A, and had no reason to bother with Button B.  It was so exciting to be talking to another person on the telephone, and it was like something I’d only seen on television to that point.  It was a voice on a machine, yet it was a human voice.  To a child of that time, that was amazing.
I was so excited when I went back to the house, that I asked my mother was there any other call I could make for her.  But sadly for me, there wasn’t.
In those days, it was pretty rare to see a phone kiosk empty, and a queue of at least one person outside.  Most people didn’t have phones in their houses up to the early 1990’s, and mobile phones were totally non-existent when I was a child.  So therefore the main means of communicating to people who were quite a distance away was by the public telephone.
Almost every housing estate had a phone kiosk with a telephone book, but the trouble was, bleeps would be played on the phone before the customer had used up their three minute allocation of time talking.  After that, the customer had to search frantically for coins to be put back in the slot, to prevent the call line from being cut off.
Sadly at times, many of the phones were vandalised, which was more than a pity, because many times these phones made a difference in whether a doctor or ambulance would arrive at a patients home in time to save them from illness or death.
Friendships were made outside the phone box, and there was more than a few arguments about who belonged where in the queue.  Also many people gave the phone number of the phone box on their application forms when they were looking for a job.  People in England and the USA who had family members on our road, would also have the phone’s number and would use it to contact their family.  Their family members would wait inside the phone box if they were lucky, and if it wasn’t in use, to receive the calls.  If they were unlucky it could be a cold wait outside waiting for the person inside to finish their call. 
Booking a taxi couldn’t be easier at that time thanks to the phone boxes, but if you made an appointment with another person you had to turn up on time.  There was no luxury of sending texts on mobile phones excusing yourself for being late, and telling the other person you’d be there soon. 
In the short few years since that time, it’s amazing how much has changed.  Certainly mobile phones are in the possession of almost every person in the land.  The remaining kiosks lie empty throughout the land, and one by one they are disappearing.
But I’ll never forget the excitement of talking for the first time to a human being from that machine at the end of the housing estate.