Five Years Of Futel

16 Jul 2019

Five years ago, Futel established its first lodgement upon the public space by deploying a single payphone with no identifying information attached to it. Eventually one person picked up the handset, and then another, and another. We confused many people, while a group of dedicated users and occasional experimenters grew around us. Now we have expanded to eight public phones and another at a houseless rest area. We provide over twelve thousand outgoing calls a year and many other encounters with our services, interactions, and operators. They laughed at us at the beginning, but who’s laughing now? The same people, mostly. But more importantly, many people have laughed and cried into our phones, and also asked questions, made demands, expressed themselves, and rambled on confusingly. We hope to continue fielding calls far into the future.

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