Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 28, 1993 TAG: 9301280142
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
PHONE BOOTHS ARE URBAN DINOSAURS
Q: Why don't you see phone booths anymore?A: There was a time when making a phone call was a civilized ritual performed within a comfortable environment. You would enter a booth, close the door, and a light would come on. You dialed the operator, gave a name, and after much switching you reached a person who reacted to your call as though it were the most remarkable piece of communication since the Ten Commandments.
(You wore a hat in those days; when enraged you'd say "Darn the luck!")
Now, you go to a bank of phones stuck on a wall, punch some buttons, get a "menu" of options, punch more buttons, get "voice mail," and talk to a machine while everyone else around you listens in. Civilization begets barbarism.
Phone booths began to die in December of 1963, when the Bell System began advertising a coin telephone "shelf" similar to what you see today. The next stylistic blow to the booth came with the decision to make them out of glass and metal instead of wood; wood didn't match the new glass-and-steel architecture of the modern city.
At one point in the early 1970s there appeared a phone booth that required no hands. The caller spoke into a microphone; a speaker in the ceiling projected the voice of the person on the other end. The experiment failed because people insisted on shouting at the ceiling.
Why did booths go out of fashion?
Three reasons:
1. "People use them as toilets. Or little offices. And they became very difficult to maintain," says Paul Hirsch, a spokesman for Pacific Bell in San Francisco. (The toilet problem has surely always existed, but in the last two decades there has been an increase in the number of homeless people in big cities and a proliferation of "Restrooms for Patrons Only" signs.)
2. Space. Phone booths take up a lot of room. They don't meet modern standards for efficient use of space.
3. Handicapped access. You can't negotiate a booth if you're in a wheelchair. This was the specific reason that Pacific Bell cited in 1977 when it replaced booths with phone stands.
The phone booth is now a museum piece, a blast from the past. Let's just hope they leave the booths in restaurants - the ones with tables. Because if you're ever going to cut a major deal over lunch, it simply has to be in a booth.
Q: Why does every president spend so much time at Camp David even though the White House is some classy digs?
A: The No. 1 thing you want in a home is the ability to walk around in your undergarments. This is not possible in the White House, because there are guards, and staffers, and tourists. (Besides which, most recent occupants of the White House have been the kind of people who wear jammies and slippers.)
"In the White House you can never be alone," says former presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. "You can never escape the officialdom of your job at the White House."
If the president walks a few feet out the door, a crowd gathers at the gates not far away. He's in a fishbowl.
"Camp David allows you to do the human things, which is walk out the back door with the dog and walk in the woods, and nobody gives you any trouble," Fitzwater says.
The bad news for Bill Clinton: There's not a McDonald's for miles.
Q: Why do we get a runny nose when we get a cold?
A: We've been in the Why business so long now, we no longer make mere statements - we make pronouncements. And one of the pronouncements we've been making of late is that a cold virus doesn't cause a runny nose, but, rather, the brain commands the nose to run as a mechanism for ridding the nasal passages of the virus. This seemed logical, scientific and faintly reassuring whenever we found ourselves dealing with a major goo-a-thon.
We were wrong, naturally. Our sources now tell us that the runny nose is not an efficient way to get rid of a virus. In fact - here's the awful truth - the runny nose is something of a trick conjured up by the virus itself, for its own dastardly devices.
The runny nose is a way of getting rid of particles that fly up your nose, like pepper or pollen. The virus has exploited this mechanism; it triggers the release of inflammatory chemicals that make your nose congested. It does this because it can use the fluid as a transportation mechanism - it literally can ride the stuff all through your head and chest, and then out into the world where it can invade the lives of other innocents. Meanwhile most of the virus remains securely fixed inside the cells of your nose, and won't budge no matter how often you reach for the hankie.
"The nose was maybe not designed to handle cold viruses but to handle these other things, and the cold virus may take advantage of some of these natural processes," says Jack Gwaltney, professor of internal medicine at the University of Virginia: "Everything our bodies do for us is not necessarily good."
The bigger picture is this: The idea that our bodies are finely tuned mechanisms is simply a myth. There's a lot of slop and wobble in the system. We may be highly evolved, but so is the little thing that causes the common cold.>
Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.