Ubiquitous (adj.) : existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered : WIDESPREADSam Waterston just appeared on his final episode of Law & Order last Thursday night. Do you know how long he'd been playing the character of Jack McCoy? Well, when he first appeared on the show in the mid-Nineties, detectives Briscoe and Logan still had to pull over and use pay phones to call the precinct.
Pay phones were everywhere, just a part of the landscape. There were banks of them at the airport, and you'd use them to call home to let them know your flight had arrived and you needed a ride. If you were broke and had a bit of larceny in your heart, you'd place a person-to-person collect call to "Homer" and they'd know you were ready to be picked up, saving you that crucial twenty-five cents.
The neighborhood weed dealer would be loitering by the pay phone out in front of the Majik Market waiting for calls from customers so he wouldn't have to talk about that stuff on his own phone line.
Once, when out for a late night walk with a friend, we were drawn to one whose kiosk was glowing hypnotically blue in the muggy Georgia summer night. On jiggling the coin return handle experimentally, it disgorged several bucks worth of silver like a slot machine that had just come up jackpot. We bought sodas and Slim Jims with our windfall and continued our stroll.
Nowadays? They're practically gone. It's an oddity to see a free-standing payphone these days. It's probably safe to say that the majority of Americans under thirty have never used one. I can't remember the last time I did, but it was almost certainly before I finally gave in and got my first cell phone in '03.
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