By Dan Miller
May 15, 2007
Seeing a public phone booth is becoming as rare as spotting an ivory-billed woodpecker.
The main difference -- the woodpeckers are making a comeback, while phone booths are vanishing forever.
And really.... who needs a phone booth anymore?
If you want a private conversation, you simply step outside with your cell phone.
Or you can talk on the phone inside your car.
Almost everybody on the road seems to be doing that at any given moment.
That, by the way, is the reason they'll never completely outlaw talking on the phone while driving.
The genie is too far out of the bottle.... we can't put it back!
My daughter spotted the phone booth pictured here inside the Chattanooga Choo Choo train station a few months ago.
She was immediately attracted to the "cute little room"... and, honestly, I had to explain what it was.
And if you think phone booths are becoming ancient history, there are young adults walking around today who've never seen the old operator switchboards.... the kind that looked like a giant honeybee nest with wires sticking out everywhere.
To younger folks, those old switchboards belong in the same era as Eli Whitney's cotton gin.
Truthfully though, we were using a big switchboard here at Channel 4 just a few years ago.
OK, well maybe it was about 30 years ago, but it seems fairly recent to me.
The reason we no longer need switchboards is, nowadays, anybody can transfer a call to anyone else in the office just by pushing a button on their phone.
Well, in theory anybody can do that.
I haven't yet honed that particular skill with the necessary degree of confidence.
If I answer the phone and it's for someone else, I'll simply admit to the caller that I'm not really up to speed on transferring a call.
Then I'll give them the direct number for the person they're trying to reach and suggest they call that number.
Sometimes though, I just walk out of my office and yell to whoever the call is for to please step inside my office because they have a call in there.
I tell them to just sit at my desk and use my phone.
Then I'll step outside so they can have a little privacy.
For them, it's not unlike being in a phone booth.
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