Widow Rented Rotary Phone for 42 Years — Amazing.
A widow rented a rotary dial telephone for 42 years, paying what her family calculates as more than $14,000 for a now outdated phone.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, first leased two black rotary phones — the kind whose round dial is moved manually with your finger — in the 1960s. Back then, the technology was new and owning telephones was unaffordable for most people.
Until two months ago, Strogen was still paying AT&T to use the phones — $29.10 a month. Strogen’s granddaughters, Melissa Howell and Barb Gordon, ended the arrangement when they discovered the bills.
Let’s hope she didn’t have AOL also, that would be a pain to cancel 😉
Tons of the elderly have continued to rent phones because they don’t know to have them taken out. I would bet this is more likely in rural areas.
My former ISP, a baby Bell, is charging customers $15, $20, $30, $40 and $50 for the same DSL service, depending on when they signed up for it and what promotion was in effect. They are very happy with their earliest customers, who still pay $50 a month for DSL they now sell for $30, and enrtry promo for $20. Making customers call in to get a better deal is a long-standing Ma Bell business tactic. My former ISP was just bought out and is in the process of reverting all customers to $50 as their DSL contracts expire, then they wait for a conplaint call before offering another discounted contract. Hence, they are my former ISP.
There are many times that I wish for the single black rotary phone. It had a 5 foot cord and stayed in the hall on a little table. You could actually walk out the house and be out of contact. Barbaric, wasn’t it.
As I tell my friends who have Cellphones..
I love my phone, as when others call, and it rings, AND Im not home…
THEY kow I aint home.
When it Has a Busy tone, they KNOW I am home and talking, call back later.
A few years back, we moved to a small town in Oklahoma. Getting the usual utilities was a breeze.
Tho the phone company automatically added some service for around $ 5/month. It easily disappeared among all the other fee junk the phone companies list in their bills.
What was the service? Well, if our phone broke down, we could borrow a phone for “free” from the phone company while our own phone was repaired :-O
We did not ask for such a moronic service. I’m sure many just pay, month after month, year after year.
It’s a pity big, “trusted” companies go out of their way to rip off customers. They know what they’re doing, It’s their screw the customer policy
“…in the 1960s. Back then, the technology was new and owning telephones was unaffordable for most people.” What country is this article talking about? Unaffordable for most people in the 1960’s???
Back then, I had to remember my essential numbers and dial right the first time because it was such a pain to have to redial.
Ahhh… big corporate america…..
I worked at an independent phone company in rural america when I was fresh out of college.
We started an ISP and Long distance company and I made sure that we proactively looked at customer bills on a regular basis (via traffic statistics) to ensure they were on the optimal billing plan.
This got the LD and ISP venture MILES of goodwill with customers. It is a shame more companies don’t take the attitude of “it must benefit ALL involved (customer and company) – or it is not worth doing.”
I think it is more correct to say that you weren’t _allowed_ to own your phone in the 60’s. Being a monopoly, if you could buy a phone the price was probably $200, over twice the monthly mortgage.
Ester Strogen????
Some telcos also charge extra for amenities that are part of the infrastructure. For example, my sister-in-law refused to pay the additional monthly hit for tone dialing, so for decades she was still on pulse. That went on until quite recently, in fact I’m not sure that it isn’t still going on!
The local telco, Telus, invented opt-out plans where they would credit you for the “service” for six months. Then when you try to call them to cancel … well, of course they are the telephone company, so it doesn’t cost them anything to keep you waiting and waiting and waiting … It was impossible to write or email them to cancel the “service”. Eventually they got dressed down by the regulatory body in Canada, the CRTC. Although I am sympathetic to unionized workers earning decent wages, and had been faithful to the telco long past the time it was economically wise to do so, their tactics made me switch long distance to an independent carrier. I still have to pay Telus the hefty monthly fee, but oh well.
LOL!!! Really. Ester Strogen!?!
Those phones were great weapons also-my Mom almost killed my old man with one – his head broke-not a scratch on the phone.
Ahhh, those were the good ole days…
Those old phone rock! My grandparents had the old western electric phones pretty much until my grandma moved into the senior building she’s in now. You really had to work hard to even put a scratch in them.
Maybe that why we’re still using an old GTE phone in Master Control for our IFB/MC line….Everything else in the building is on a PBX except for us.
-A
I used to be a telco “phoneguy” doing housecalls. I saw this a lot. One time I recommended an old woman to save money by cancelling her contract with AT&T and purchasing a cheap phone. She took my advice. I was dispatched to her home and what do you know it!… she had a new phone out of the box that didn’t work! Out of guilt I personally took the phone to the Radio Shack where she purchased it to get a replacement.
Something similiar happened at an IT job I had. I replaced a customer’s 13″ monitor with a spare 17″ one I had. I was doing him a favor although he wasn’t present when I did it. The next day I got chewed out and the customer demanded his 13″ back– he didn’t want a bigger screen.
The lesson I learned is that I keep my mouth shut. I don’t suggest anything to customers anymore. I run into users who are wearing thick glasses while they work on a monitor that is blurry, wobbly text and defective but they are not aware of it. They don’t complain even when I’m there to fix something else about their PC.
And, you were not allowed to attach any non-telco owned equipment to the phone lines in the 60s.
Ma Bell NEVER sold a telephone. They were always leased.
Never trust a service provider. Period.
When I was in college in the 60s, if you wanted to dodge Ma Bell’s per-phone charge for extensions you got hold of another phone somewhere (someone always had one in a closet) and simply disconnected the bell. They detected extensions by the change in impedance so they never caught on.
Then actual competition hit the market and I realized I wasn’t “getting over” at all – I’d been the sucker all along.
Never trust a monopoly, especially a legislated one.
Well, actually, Ma Bell and the others did eventually sell most of the installed phones in people’s houses. These were the same phones that folks had leased for decades. As part of the breakup of AT&T IIRC, they had to give you the option of purchasing the phone. My parents did, and still have one “dial instrument” that they purchased just that way.
They used to charge extra for touch-tone, but later, when you could actually buy a telephone, if you bought a TT and hooked it to a “pluse” line, it would work just fine at no extra change.
But this lady who rented for 42 years is just nuts, stupid or something. I would blame it on age, but she couldn’t have been that old 42 years ago!
DAve
In a few years, the story of the day will be suckers who signed multi-year cell phone contracts back at the turn of this century!
Won’t that be a hoot!
But this lady who rented for 42 years is just nuts, stupid or something. I would blame it on age, but she couldn’t have been that old 42 years ago!
No, this was a woman who wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand the significance of reading or understanding her phone bill. All these people sound so superior. At the risk of sounding sexists, I’ll bet she could bake a pecan pie better then you.
My Dad told me that when he was a kid in the mid 50’s, you had a phone with no rotory…you picked up the reciever, clicked the button a couple times and an operator came on….you then told her the number you wanted to call or a name if you didn’t remember the number(3 digets only) and she connected you. And most likely she listened in on your call.
23. As an outside plant tech I never listened on even when I was sitting at a feeder for hours waiting for a tester to pick me up (had two sets). Out of curiosity I did just one time to see what it was like “tapping” into someone’s line. The few calls I listened to that day were all nonsense talk about relatives and friends. 100% gossip. Believe me, no one’s missing anything.
I’ll bet this lady had the same phone the entire time. Back then you at least knew what you were paying for – a phone that would survive a nuclear blast or a flood, and if it ever did break you’d get another one, perhaps just as ugly, but the damned thing WORKED. Today people put up with the crappiest of cell phone services, and like it. That old phone would probably let you “hear a pin drop”. Who are the fools here then? I’ve said all along we’ve taken a step backward in telecommunications services. Wires are better. And I still want fibre to the premises, btw.