$14,000 to rent rotary phone

[SquirrelDip]

$14,000 to rent rotary phone

(sorry - don't have the original link)

Herald News Services



Friday, September 15, 2006



Telephony - A widow rented a rotary dial telephone for 42 years, paying what her family calculates as more than $14,000 for a now outdated phone.

Ester Strogen, 82, of Canton, Ohio, first leased two black rotary phones -- the kind whose round dial is moved manually with your finger -- in the 1960s.

Until two months ago, Strogen was still paying AT&T to use the phones -- $29.10 US a month. Strogen's granddaughters, Melissa Howell and Barb Gordon, ended the arrangement when they discovered the bills.

"I'm outraged," Gordon said. "It made me so mad. It's ridiculous. If my own grandmother was doing it, how many other people are?"

New Jersey-based Lucent Technologies, a spinoff of AT&T that manages the residential leasing service, said customers were given the choice option to opt out of renting in 1985. The number of customers leasing phones dropped from 40 million nationwide to about 750,000 today, he said.

© The Calgary Herald 2006

[BJ_M]

that is just pathetic -- that she never checked her bill


though they should send her a nice new phone - but they will up her bill for touchtone service

[SquirrelDip]

How many people here rent their cable modem???

[BJ_M]

no choice in the mater here - you have to get one from rogers - though they dont break out any rental fee as a sep. item ....

[gll99]

no choice in the mater here - you have to get one from rogers - though they dont break out any rental fee as a sep. item ....

I bought my Rogers modem for $99 (Motorola) about 2 years ago to get the upgrade to extreme at a lower cost.
Lately with the price increase as of Aug 28, 2006, I just switched to Express to avoid the extra cost.

About 25 + years ago my mom was paying Bell for an old phone. I asked her why she hadn't bought her own more modern phone and she said that although she only had 1 phone she was paying for 2 because 1 had been damaged and got thrown out. Bell told her she needed to return both phones or pay $300 (could be $200 but I recall it was excessive) for any lost equipment to get out of the rental. So she had been paying for years for an extra old phone she didn't have. I had a couple of phones (1 green and 1 black) that I had picked up at a flea market a few years prior and 1 was just sitting on a shelf in my basement. I took 1 of mine and hers back to Bell and bought her a new phone for $30. She had been paying around $15 for those 2 phones every stinking month for many many years but we had never discussed it before. Her phone was a rotary and mine from the flea market was similar in design but push button and both had only cost me $5. Her original phones were garbage and yet Bell wanted full payment way in excess of any realistic value.

I know that this is still true with a lot of rented equipment. For example, you can buy a digital cable box for $99 from a retail outlet which have been on sale for as low as $50 but should a rental box be stolen they will quote you a replacement value of over $300.

[sunflower98]

Wow that is crazy. And 750,000 people continued leasing phones? Why??

[Super Warrior]

Ester Strogen, 82, of Canton, Ohio, first leased two black rotary phones -- the kind whose round dial is moved manually with your finger -- in the 1960s.

Ester Strogen? or "Es-Strogen".

Looks like another one of those odd names that could be seen as something else, like that guy named Jack Hoff(Jack-off? heheh.)

[SquirrelDip]

I recall way back when things were first openning up - you were actually permitted to use your own hardware. Prior to this you had to use the telco's hardware.

The story they gave was that their hardware was better and if you used your own phone then they would not help WHEN a problem occured with the phone. i.e. Bullshit. However, many people believed it. These are probably the same people still renting their phones.

[thecoalman]

I've heard of this happening before more than once. Usually the same story too, old person dies and kids find they have been paying for the phone for 20 years. What's really ridiculous is you can buy a phone for $30.

My cable company charges $3 a month for the modem. I just went and bought my own. 2 years down and one to go and it's all gravy.

[lumis]

I was talking to an older friend of mine and he was telling me how bad the phone company used to be. He told me he used to live in a house that had a pool, so he wanted to have a telephone in the back of the house near the pool since he spent a lot of time there. So he wired up a phone, everything was good for a couple of days until the phone company called him and told him to disconnect the outside phone line. He said he disconnected it for a couple of days and then reconnected it with no problems afterwards.

What surprised me is that they were able to detect that another phone was connected to the line.

Didn't cable companies used to charge for additional outlets in the home, on a per month basis?

[gll99]

@lumis
They can tell by the ring load.

I'm going from old memory so someone correct me if I'm off.

Your phone line always uses 2 currents. I think about 18 volts dc as the voice carrier so you can talk and somewhere around 60 volts ac for the ringer.

I don't know about current phones they may use less but each older phone then had a ring load number of 15 so the max safe number of phones on 1 line was 4 because I recall that 5 would sometimes overload it. If you went beyond the ring load your phone would not ring or it might even interfere with your neighbours.

Remember even when hydro goes out, your basic phone features still work so that means they are supplying the voice dc and ringer ac power, so they can easily monitor how much your line consumes.

[SquirrelDip]

That's how I recall also - current system works the same way. You can plug an old phone in and it will work... I'll have to guess that some may no longer recognize the rotary dial and only accept tone (but you used to have to pay extra for tone).

[BJ_M]

i guess you can buy some of these products then

http://www.sandman.com/telco.html






Ring Voltage is 90V AC btw i believe ....

non ring voltage is 48 volts DC, with a current between 20 and 100 mA. but in many areas it is much less than this -- it is still powered by banks of batteries

[Conquest10]

So phones used to be rented back in the day? That explains it all. Growing up, it was weird seeing that everyone in my family had the exact same phone.

Looked like this but without the # and * buttons.

[SquirrelDip]

I recall a lot of these:

[träskmannen]

Don't forget this one.

[gll99]

@Conquest10

That picture you posted is fairly standard but it's something like the Volkswagon bug. They look the same and yet there is something different you can't put your finger on. Is it taller? Is it shorter? Is it fatter? The angles look different... hummmm?????

I just may be old enough to remember the no dial phones where you just clicked and an operator would ask who you wanted and would place the call for you. (now I'm not admitting to this just maybe )

The original black only rotaries weighed a ton and the shell was hard as rock with a heavy rotary dial which made a clicking sound on the way back. By heavy dial I mean not easy to dial and not comfortable either. The next gen looked similar but weighed a lot less and were softer on the fingers and easier to dial. Then the first push button "pulse" phones came in and these were offered in green. The push button had tone cababilities but it cost extra and wasn't available to all in my city at first. I recall that my sister started working and rented one of the first models that looked very different. It was called a princess phone still dial style at first. It had one flaw the heavy phones were needed to stabilize the phone while you dialed but this thing was so light if you didn't hold it as you dialed it would move on you and would end up messing the numbers and/or fall off the night stand .

Although the phones look similar on the outside many things were different then. The originals had no real electronics and they used heavy coils and shell materials. Later models looked similar but introduced some lighter plastics, electronic circuits, bells etc.. The way they were wired to the wall was also different. The phone was connected directly to a small cable wired in the house and terminating close to where you wanted your phone usually central to the house on the main floor not too far from the staircase if the bedrooms were upstairs. There were no modular plugs at first. Later they used large plugs with pins similar to the ground pin on an American style electrical plug but a bit longer.

I remember experimenting as a kid when the dampener on our old phone didn't work and I fixed it for my parents by inventing my very own adjustable paper on a stick dampener to soften the bell.

As soon as I was on my own and phones could be bought we always had plenty of phones. Exact duplicates of Bell phones but with "sold by AT &T" stickers on some of them showed up at my local flea market. The guy said some stuff came from a large business closure and other from a large demolished school and he picked up all the phones and other gear so he let them go cheap but untested. I took the best I could get and they worked fine. In those days my basement was always full of junk like that and it seems I was always relocating, or finding a phone for friends and neighbours who were afraid to touch the wires.

@träskmannen
I never saw that one.

@SquirrelDip
That's probably the newest standard look rotary available.

[thecoalman]

My Grandmother still has ancient one hanging on the wall in a back room. Probably a damn antique as I know it's older than me. Still works perfect though. Sucks dialing out as it takes forever...

[gll99]

I forgot that my first phone when I got married was a wall mounted phone in the kitchen of the apartment where we lived for the first year or so. The fullsize kitchen was in the center of the unit and separated the bedroom and bathroom at the back from the livingroom and main entrance at the front. The placement of the phone was the easiest access point from all rooms. If the conversation got longer than expected we would just pull over a chair from the table.

Maybe not exact but it looked something like this but green



The phone my mother still had and similar to the one she had lost years before as I posted earlier looked like this




Apparently this phone was first introduced in 1937. I don't think she had the original quite that long because few people would have rented 2 phones back then but that design is still very familiar to me.