Mike Dank, a guy from a small town outside of Philadelphia, has a thing for pay phones. He’s loved them since he was a kid. So, when he saw one at a flea market a few years back, he bought it for 20 bucks. He says it takes him back to when he was in high school and had to use pay phones to call his parents to pick him up.
Which is weird because he’s only 31. It means that it had to be sometime around 2005 to 2009 when he was using a pay phone to call his folks. There were already I-phones then. I thought pay phones went out of existence in the late 90s. I was wrong. There are still 10s of thousands that still work.
Anyway, Mike wants others to have the pay phone experience. So, he’s installed one in Philly. Anyone can use it for free. It’s been rewired to work through the internet. He’s not the first. He got the idea from a group called Futel who do the same thing. They’ve installed 10 phones in Portland so that homeless and people in need have a way to make calls. Mike says he’ll be working on installing others.