THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 1, 1995 TAG: 9504290009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
Phone booths are still giving me a bad time.
Not all of them. But enough to raise questions about why certain of the designers and planners have done what they did.
My problems are not with any of the high-tech instruments, their illuminated screens and such, but with ordinary pay-phone cubicles - the physical shape and placement of the mechanisms themselves.
Some months back, I did some grousing in print, when my target was the tilted shelf sometimes placed under the phone box. This appendage - from which notebooks and credit cards slide off just when you need them - can be maddening.
But there are other affronts to convenience that I've too often battled with, particularly out on some trip when I wanted to call ahead for a motel reservation, check back home on something or the like.
One problem has to do with location. Much of the time, when you finally get a turn at a pay phone (odd, isn't it - how somebody always seems to be talking on almost any coin phone you see?), you find yourself right next door to big noise of some kind: the din of a restaurant, the cacophony of an airport concourse or, time and again, the roar of passing vehicles. Holding a finger in one ear gets to be standard operating procedure.
For one thing, most of the public phones I use these days are not equipped with those privacy doors of yore, being shielded only by little side panels or maybe nothing at all.
But perhaps the most serious obstacle for callers are those panels of push-button numbers that are positioned too low for easy reading. I'm not a tall person, so when the buttons are about mid-chest level for me (I checked on a couple in my neighborhood just before writing this), I'm reasonably sure that's what the average adult encounters. And that dialing height demands, for such an average caller, some awkward acrobatics, a memorized keyboard or a photographic mind.
Having researched the long-distance calling rigmarole in advance, I usually find myself at the pay phone with an incredible string of numbers written on a card or in a notebook or on a piece of paper, which I may simply have to hold in my hand or put on top of the phone box (if the phone shelf is slanted, say). I must then read off a few numbers to myself, crouch down to where I can see the buttons, push the numbers I think are right, then bob upright to see the next few numbers on my list, bob down and push, bob up, bob down, bob. . . operate with a distracting, increasingly painful crick in my back.
In any event, part-way through I'm bound to get something wrong, or I'm too slow and an operator breaks in. I have to recheck my list for correctness and start over again. Three or four such false starts, with all the incidental bobbing and peering, seem about the norm before I get through to the number I'm calling or give up.
At some public phones - tapping into the jargon of the day - there are those of us who could do with a little more user-friendliness. by CNB