Death of the Payphone (Demultiplexer)
Since the beginning of Futel, the payphone demultiplexer has been one of its most amusing features. When selected, every public phone with an incoming number that we knew of would be called simultaneously. The first one to be answered would be connected.
It was also fun to implement. We collected every incoming number that we found and tested every payphone that we ran across. It was always a thrill to find a callable phone because we knew that we could be talking to a stranger at that location in the future. It was fun to try and figure out what trick would reveal the incoming number of a communication device that didn’t want to reveal that it could be called.
And calling the demultiplexer was always a good time. Who wouldn’t pick up a ringing payphone? I personally have spent a lot of time hanging out at a Futel phone with a beer, calling unknown people. So many possibilities. When people were curious about why I was calling, maybe assuming that I had a wrong number and trying to help me find my way, I was sincere back to them and tried to make us both enjoy learning about each other. When people were annoyed, I encouraged them by annoying them further. Those who wanted mystery, or appeared open to the possibility, got it. I was a spy, a time traveler, an alien, an emergent phenomenon. I got to be all of the people that I believed I have talked to over the years. Even if nobody answered, it was nice to know that I was making bells ring all over the country.
That era is over. Public phones are greatly reduced, of course, and the ones which accept incoming calls are extremely rare. It became an annoying feature to maintain because payphones are all COCOTs now, and those almost always answer an incoming call with a modem for toll auditing. They pick up before the other phones get a chance, which wrecks the possibilities. The feature had to be tested often to purge those numbers.
The end of the line was when a previously used number was repurposed for an elevator emergency phone. I found out when I called the demultiplexer and the elevator answered automatically. Eventually I was able to get a menu that revealed what it was. I’ve had some lists of elevator phones for a while, and they can be fun to call, eavesdropping on unsuspecting passengers or confusing them with the speaker. But while it might be sketchy to call a phone which was deployed to be usable in an emergency, it’s just wrong to set up an unsuspecting Futel user to do so, and there’s a chance that it could accidentally delay or deny service for someone who was trying to make an emergency call. It’s an extremely small possibility, but it’s not something to be done for amusement.
Thank you to everyone who picked up a demultiplexer call over the years.
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