How to make phone calls for free…

Posted by noelbynature under Lifestyle
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… the catch is, most of the tricks here come 20 years too late. Why? Chun See uncovers the secrets behind making free telephone calls using a coin-operated phone. In a country where the mobile phone penetration rate is higher than 100%, public telephones are a rarity, and even more so for coin operated phones like these:

So at a time where mobile phone models change a hundred times over every year, the humble coin phone had a much slower rate of evolution. Chun See remembers the first coin-operated phone in his kampong:

I cannot recall the last time I used a coin phone; but I can remember when I first used one. It was the first (and only) public phone that was installed in our kampong just across the road from our house. Like the one in this photo below (picture from the collection of the National Archives), it was housed in a wooden cabinet which had two doors which opened outwards. The cabinet rested on a single concrete stump and base. Chained to the cabinet was a phone book.

The year must have been around 1961. This public telephone was just in front of our neighbour, Chiew Soh’s house. Hence their family became the village telephone operators. I remember one time when we received a call from my dad. Both my younger brother James and I wanted to speak into the phone and were fighting over the receiver when suddenly we heard a stern voice from behind us. It was the technician from the telephone company. He thought we were playing the fool with it, and snatched the receiver from us and hung it back on the hook.

Read more about the coin-operated phones in Chun See’s post here. If you scan through the comments, you can also find out some of the ways people tried to get more out of that 10-cent phone call or figuring out ways to make calls for free!

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