No, I cannot release your change
I just read a really great article and I recalled my days as a payphone operator. Link
I operated phones across America, some in Mexico and the Carribean, some in Ireland, the Virgin Islands, and a few other places. Basically, we were hired by private payphone owners to operate their phones.
As a sixteen year-old from Texas (with no accent training yet) my East Texan was thick. I couldn't hide it nor did I know how to do such a thing. "Oh, wow, are you in Texas, then?" New Englanders would ask. Truckers would often say, "Well sweetie, I'm jes' gonna swing raht threw Texas an' pick yew up! Thank yew!" And then those sick-os were merciless: "Listen very carefully. I know where you are. You're in Texas. I will bomb your business if you don't ..." My accent (and everyone else's) were always much talked-about. Many people had never heard a real Texas accent before. It was somewhat a novelty.
The funny thing is, when I'd operate the Spanish phones, speaking in Spanish, I'd still get asked if I was from Texas sometimes.
Aside from the accent ordeal, I learned people can be so cruel to people they don't see. For some reason, a person over the phone just doesn't qualify as a "person" to many people. I apologize in advance for the following statement, but I only speak what I know. The two states I always hated getting calls from were Illinois and Iowa. Why? These two states, bar none, were the rudest of them all. I knew when my monitor beeped that if the screen read Illinois or Iowa, I was about to be chewed on. And even funnier was how they ALWAYS began the conversation. "Hi, how are you?" That one statement revealed they were about to berate me. I didn't even need to answer the question usually.
And just so you know, an operator has a keyboard and monitor much like you have right now. So, no. I cannot release your coins. I was asked that ten million times. People would get rude and argue that I could. I would respond, perhaps rudely, that I was not inside the phone and could not therefore push the change out with a little stick. That never went over well. (Did you know its a federal offense to damage a payphone?)
I sent checks out for ten cents. Oh yes. People wanted their change back. They could have let a quarter roll under their car and been okay. They might have left a dime in a vending machine by accident. But have a phone rob them of a nickel? War is on. I'd place the complaint and have the owner of the phone send a check for change. Silly, huh? The stamp costs more.
And the children playing on payphones at 12 or 2 in the morning. I was outraged. They would be 12 and making lewd calls. But not just the children. See, the rule was as long as the person asking for you to place the call wasn't being rude with you and wasn't cursing at you, you had to place the call. A particular man kept calling. The same guy. I got him each time he called. He was having sex. While making a third party call. I finally got a friend to take the call while I took his call. I think the guy was just enjoying getting a female operator involved. What a moron. He stopped after my friend took the final call.
Then there are the repeat callers. There's the one guy we called "Area Code Man." He would call and ask for an area code. We're not supposed to do that, but sometimes do as a courtesy. While we're looking it up, he'd make conversation. Remember, these are pay phones. He'd say, "Do you like horses? What's your favorite horse? Why?" and more. Tons of odd questions. And then ask for another area code when we found the one we were looking up. We had to just cut the poor guy off only to just have him call in again.
Then there were the days the local mental institution got to make calls. Mostly, they called us.
I can't tell you how many times I talked people out of suicide.
Or how many times I got threatened by bombers, rapists, et cetera on the payphone.
A very stressful job indeed.
I know I'm about to make you Portugese-speakers very upset. I handled Spanish calls. But once there was a Portugese call. No one spoke Portugese. I said I'd give it a shot. I asked him if he spoke Spanish. If we had a common language we could get through this, right? He was furious with me that I would SUGGEST he spoke Spanish. So I continued the call in Spanish anyway. It worked. Either he spoke Spanish or Portugese is close enough to Spanish.
While at work, you'd have a few seconds, maybe a minute between calls. Sometimes I'd read. I read Tim Allen's Don't Stand Too Close To A Naked Man while working there. I colored a lot on busy nights. We passed notes a lot too.
One of the hardest things about the job was knowing that somewhere in Kentucky there's a woman who just walked 2 miles in the rain in heels to get to the phone and there's no way you can put her through because her card doesn't work. Or she's short ten cents. And it's not an emergency. (Emergency dials police and ambulance immediately.) For me, that was the toughest. I could only pray for her. And others like her.
I hope you guys will remember to be kind to your hard-working payphone operators. They really are people who work hard and do care. At least some do. Oh. And they can't push the coins out of the phone with a stick.