JERRY AGAIN why do clocks run clockwise? answer mechanical clocks are evolved from sundials which cast shadows that when applied to mechanical clocks moved the same way. thus clockwise.

A belated comment on Spruceman's post, as I work in telecomms: No, there's no master list of payphones, because there are hundreds of companies that own them. I myself am about to start my own COCOT empire. And if you want NPA NXX lists, you can buy them from Bellcore.

Hey Chuck...(if you're still reading these responses). Excellent story...highly righteous concept. Might have to try it myself. I'll let you know how it goes...

its a great idea and i laughed aloud but done you people have anything better to do withyour time. bomb scares for example!

There once was a man from San Anton' Who wanted to call a payphone It rang and it rang Until with a bang The man left the phone all alone.

this is great ...i will try to get you some numbers in the uk today ...please stay posted as it will be soon brian

i will try to get some in the uk stay posted

The Atlantic city story reminded me of my own Payphone Event. It was more like a new Atlantic City event, except it happened in Newfoundland, Canada. It was in highschool and I was hanging out at the mall with a friend. I needed to call someone for a ride home so I picked up the receiver of the nearest payphone. When I put it to my ear all I heard was a weird ticking sound so I placed it back in the cradle. All of a sudden... JACKPOT! Coins started pouring out of the change slot just like it was a one armed bandit! My so-called 'friend' pushed me aside and began grabbing the money. Suddenly, a man who was using the other pay phone said "Just a minute." to whoever he was talking to and put the receiver down. He grabbed my friend and pushed him against the wall. "That's the little lady's money!" He said, and motioned for me to grab the change still spilling out of the machine.So I did and I made $20 bucks. So next time you don't hear a dial tone on a payphone... listen for the ticking... you might hit Payphone Payday!

'Jerry again' sez clockwise clocks move that way cuz they "evolved from sundials which cast shadows that when applied to mechanical clocks moved the same way." I might point out that this is not due to the nature of SUNDIALS, but of the HEMISPHERE (i.e., NORTHERN) where said sundial was first deployed. Australian sundials run counterclockwise... Of course, we can be thankful that they WERE first used North of the Equator; otherwise we would be forced to refer to that thing we look at most when at work as a "counter-clock!"

I was once at the top of the Empire State Building standing around and the payphone started ringing. So I answered it and some guy asked me if the guy working the penny-flattening thing was busy. I said he was, and then he asked about the girl at the souvenir counter. She was busy too, so he said thanks and hung up. I wish I had written down that number...

There is a guy in Thornton, NH, who figured out how to wire up an M-80 firecracker to the ringer of his roommate's phone, so it would be detonated by an incoming call. The first couple of times this prank was pulled, the victim thought the phone had been hit by lightening. The telephone repair guy advised him to change his number, but of course that didn't do any good. After the fourth explosion, the poor guy went bugshit. Oh well, we wanted a new roommate anyway...

Great site. Reminds me of a time at work. My phone was broken, but the remote ringer worked. There was no way to answer an incoming call, no voice mail. All day long the phone would ring 4 or 5 times before I was paged. When the next shift came on, I was inspired. On my way home, I stopped at a pay phone, dialed my extension , and left the phone off the hook. The next day I had a new phone. I guess after it rang for 15 minutes they rounded up another phone to answer my call.

This is a Don Anthony Special.Think Hard. What color will everyone be 10,000 years from now? This is not a racial thing.

The "ticking" slot machine thingy is true. Once about 10-12 years ago in front of the Telephone Co building in Birdsboro Pa(photo to come later) the payphone was not working on a Sunday. My brother, who is a phone NUT, drove up to see the building and we found the payphone in such order. The take was not as much, only a couple of bucks, but it still caused my brother to laugh his ass off.

I remember when I was a kid and most phone numbers had 7 digits, if you dialled a certain 3 numbers then the last 4 numbers of the phone you were using, waited for a click then put the reciever down the phone would start ringing. You just had to pick the right payphone for maximum mayhem, sit back and wait for people to take the bait - well, this *was* before Playstations so we had to do something to keep ourselves amused ;-) I don't know if this would still work now the phones have gone digital, but if anyone can remember the magic number can they please let me know, cos it's been bugging me for ages.

I found your site at cyberguy.com. It's great! Keep up the good work!

If you're as sick as I am of mobile phone users who; don't turn their phones off in the cinema talk way too loudly on trains sell you an ounce of "finest Moroccan" which turns out to be an OXO cube, then now's your chance to get revenge. Go to: www.trshcity.demon.co.uk/EDIT/EDIT0063.HTM and have fun :-)

KA site. If you're at a payphone, and don't have another phone to dial the payphone, dial the payphone's number and hang it up. The phone will ring. This works with any phone.

I don't know if it's already been mentioned, but if you dial 958 on a payphone in New York City, you'll get an autmated message telling you the number of that payphone. It doesn't work with all the phones, but it worked on most of the phones I tried.

Mal UK: When I was young, we would pull the "make-your-own-phone-ring" prank regularly. It worked with dial phones, so I don't think it works with touch-tone phones. Anyhow, we'd dial "7-6-1-1" and hang up quickly. The phone would start ringing in a second or two, but usually not the normal ring; the rings would be spaced closer together. On further experimentation, it seemed that 7-6-x-1 was the sequence necessary, i.e., 7-6-2-1, 7-6-3-1, etc. would also achieve this effect.

I moved out of state to Panama City Beach, FL for the summer and was living in a motel where they charge outrageous fees for long-distance. So instead of using the phone in my room, I'd use a payphone down the block. I found out that this particular phone, when you'd put a quarter in, the money would register and fall back down into the coin return. How delighted I was!!!! I would call all my friends and my family and literally talk for hours each day. Every 10 minutes or so the recording would come on "please insert $3.75 for the next 10 minutes" so I'd have to take my quarter and keep running it through the coin slot about 20 or 30 times to keep building up talk time credit.

the atlantic city story was true poetry! I think I will try to find some like minded friends at college or at home and try to recreate it- perhaps sans sax player, since I don't know anyone who plays sax. in any case, this is an endlessly amusing website! Any one in the PGH area interested in having a simultaneous payphone prank?

Greetings from Canada! In the 506 area code (New Brunswick) you can dial 572 and the last 7 digits of any phone you happen to be using and then hang up. You have to pick it up again (getting a high pitch dial tone) and then hang up. About 15 seconds later the phone will ring. The access number for (902) Nova Scotia/PEI is 575. Also of interest is what can be done with automated 3rd party billing. In the 506 and 902 areas, if a pay phone will ring, then it will accept 3rd party toll charges. Just dial "0" and the # you are calling, and enter the pay phone # when asked what # to charge the call to. When asked for your name, say someting like "This is the phone company, please press '1'". Works really well when you need to know what time it is in Japan. :) E-mails welcome, happy phreaking.

Although I didn't actually pull a phone prank, answering the phone in the hall of the dorm 36 years ago, and foolishly talking to the total stranger at the other end, allowed me to now be on my 34th year of marriage with his best friend. Hey, pick up that phone. You never know who'll be at the other end. Live dangerously.

I did that once. Someone called my home and it was a wrong number and I talked to him for a while, but he turned out to be a pervert, so I don't see any wedding bells in our future anytime soon. All he wanted to do was talk about my mother...

The ph # in the alabama section with the silly long description 205 739-3530 isn't a payphone at all. It's just the courthouse. they have one operator that transfers you to the dept you need to talk to. i'll look in there and see if they have a payphone in a hallway somewhere. can't remember one right off. mostly stooges roaming the halls anyhow, old men wanting to swap pocketknives, or deputies that if they were any more stupid would have to be watered once a week.

Your webiste was used on an English chat show, They got some numbers and showed your site! The show's called SO Graham Norton, that's how I got this site It's cool- Keep it up!

I once taped a rhino beetle to the receiver of a pay phone with his legs pointed out. I then dialed the pay phone and when an older woman answered the phone the rhino beetles legs grabbed her ear and she screamed bloody murder.

The beetle bit is quite hysterical. The number I remember dialing to make your own phone ring (back in the early 80's in Michigan) was 711-wait for dialtone again-6-quickly hang up. My friend had an Apple with an Applecat modem, you could do a lot of interesting things with it. He figured out what the loudest possible tone was that you could transmit over the phone - good for pranks. He also set up a dialer to dial "through" the entire dorm system at Western Michigan University - their phones were sequentially numbered. A phone would ring once, then the next room would ring once, etc, etc. We heard it coming down the hall, it got to us, it was busy (duh), then it kept going past us.

Hey Yeah I saw your web site on the UK comedy show So Graham Norton also.. thats how I got your site. It is a very cool site.. he used it to call a phone in Memphis because he had tarzan star Miles Okeef on the show and he called this bar from your list to see if anyone there knew him and the woman that answered did. It was very funny.. seemingly he had been in a few days before and she was tlaking to him. It was a pure fluke that he found her but it was very funny... keep up the good work.. inspired site

I have a better story, years ago at a college in Maryland, some students had an idea to simultaneously flush all the toilets on campus. well it wass aranged to happen on a Sunday night I believe, at the stroke of many hands all toilets flushed at once. Well the sewer pipes couldnt handle it or the water main either, they both collapsed. And for this they had no water for days but made the National and International headlines.

Yes, and this is as believable as the bit about someone putting syringes in payphone coin-return slots and infecting innocent people with the AIDS virus. Time to read up on your urban legends.

HEY THERE, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK GUY'S, ITS GREAT!!!

I like graham norton, he is very funny, he should come back soon. i'll maybe put up a phone line at my school, it's only connected to a modem so it won't ring, although it could just be some1 is ringing when we wanna use the modem, u never know lalalalalalalalalalalala eimi ixthus. lalalalalalalalalalalala kamhloi sophoi eisi. lalalalalalalalalalalala odi brassicam. vale omnes

this time is wrong, i posted it at 21:48 BST or 20:48 GMT

Inspired by the Atlantic City thing, I got a few of my friends together to do something similar. In a mall in Georgia, there is a small entrance-room with four pay phones against one wall, four pay phones on the wall across from it, and a set of automatically opening doors on either side of each payphone wall. I got a few of my friends to keep calling their payphone with the assigned number and me and another friend sat against the wall under the pay phones and watched the grand confusion it caused to the people walking in the mall and also to the people who tried to answer them :)

I once stumbled and tripped my way up to the teller at the local bank and asked her for my balance. Long live the nonconformists!

My friend used to live in a ground floor apartment across the street from a payphone. He used to call it just as a beautiful girl was walking by. He would then pretend it was a wrong number but try to keep her on the line anyway. At some point, he would tell her what he liked to see in a woman. He would then simply describe the actual woman he was talking to as he looked at her from behind the blinds of his apartment. She would get excited at this "coincidence" and he would ask her for a date! It was amazing how well this worked.

2 weeks ago I was at the theater watching a Neil Simon play, when my pager went off. No big deal, I thought, I'll call her when it's over. She paged me 3 more times in the next 5 minutes. Must be important, right? So, I excuse myself and approached the only payphone in the playhouse. Picked up the receiver and there was no dialtone. Hit the switchhook 3 or 4 times.. nothing. Hung up the receiver in frustration, counted down from 5 slowly, picked up the phone, and out poured $3.75. it was too cool. A guy walking by stopped and commented "I bet that's the cheapest call you'll ever make." and it was collect too.

YAH !!! if any body GET DOWN here THERE is A grEAT nEW THING i jUST diSCovERED http://WWW.DIALPAD.com FREE LONG DISTANCE (just when i thought i'd never make full use of your site) : )

I use dialpad.com as well, HIGHLY recommended for anyone who wants to spend hours pranking payphones across the nation for free :)

long live phone booths!

here are some phone numbers 907 456 7328--Interesting set up here a payphone on the coorner of airport road and eielson street 907 479 2134--This is a night club always bouncin with people

We used to hang out at a laundromat where there was a payphone. Someone had cut some wires going to the phone and we were trying to rig it back up for use. Quite a bit of change came out of the slot, but we could never re-create this. Glad I bumped into your site.

i co-own and work in a record store in ohio.....theres a payphone across the street from my store that you can clearly see. i started noticing one day looking out the window that alot of people use this phone...so of course i took this to my advantage and ran across the street one day and got the #........now i have a really fun hobby to do on slow days.

dialpad's actually promoting this site! check out the help faq...

That's how I got here, very cool.

I'm a radio DJ in Indiana and am always looking for clever ideas to keep the show interesting. Well, I think this will be a smash hit! Can't wait to try it out and record the conversations for airplay. I'll keep ya posted! Thanks!

Wow, great site. I have a large list of payphones on Staten Island (718), and Ill send it as soon as I sort out which ones work and which don't. I also have a few pics of payphones, I'll take some more and send them in as well. Have a nice day!

I'd like to add some #'s from around here, a sleepy little town one hour and 20 minutes east of New York City. But I can't connect to the appropriate server. It's the phone in the coin-op laundromat on Main Street. (631)544-9876. I'm usually doing my laundry there on Sundays!

thanks for highly knowledgelable info. very good info. for me. I am also working in payfone compony named as ZIP TELECON LTD. in india at mumbai as a Technical Support Officer. please inform me in datails on my E-mail on swanandnt@yahoo.com

Wow excellent site! stumbled accross it quite by accident! Glad i did! I can see hours of slow university days being sped up by this site!!! When i used to walk to school me and mates used to pass a phone box, it was almost always ringing, we never plucked up courage to answer tho! and on many occaisions would simply stop as we neared it! clearly someone having fun!

Next time,pick up that phone.

would someone from america mind giving a friend of mine in the uk a crank call, I don't want to do it myself cause he would spot it straight away... Ring 07769 721709 (you will have to add the country code 44 I think) and ask for kevin miller (and the rest is up to your imagination), I would particularly like to know how he reacts so post it back on here.

That first story:- Made me laugh. Nealry made me cry. ~~~Respect~~~ STAIN

i want to get into the operation of payphones i would like to purchase some for my rent houses. is there any one who would know what website to go to for this info? EXCELLENT PAYPHONE STORIES YOU HAVE ON THIS SITE!

I live in Ocean City Maryland. For three months out of the year the population of Pensulvania migrates to my town to act stupid and buy stuff, which makes my job harder because they buy a lot of stuff. This plan was actually organized by a friend, but I have used it a lot. We recently had a Ripley's Believe it or not put on the boardwalk at the inlet. We call payphones that are about 6 blocks north of Ripley's claiming to be DJ's from a local radio station. We tell people that we are holding a contest called the "dash for cash" and if they can make it to Ripley's in two minutes or less they will win 500 dollars and four free tickets. I have never seen people run so fast in my life. It started to catch on too. I have answered several phones walking down the boardwalk and someone has tried to get me to do it. I always answer them by saying, "Sorry I live here." By the way, excelent phone site!!

You should add a World Trade Center Payphone memorial listing all of the payphone numbers from the WTC.....

I want to buy westminster chimes wall clock. I stay in Mumbai. Can you help me? Suhas.

what kind of help do you need?

yes, i can help you, fellow citizen. contact p. jeejeebhoy towers, and ask for earl. charles forjett was my great uncle. my cousin's brother's, sister-in-law's lover's husband is selling his wife's clock... handsome neoclassic styling...

Dear Earl, Thank you so much for your response. Will you please give me your contact number? I either want my present Citizen Clock get repaired or else want to know for how much I will get a the new one having Westminster Chimes (plays after every 15 minutes). Will you be able to quote the approximate price? Regards, Suhas.

Dear Kibo, I either want my present Citizen Clock get repaired or else want to know for how much I will get a the new one having Westminster Chimes (plays after every 15 minutes). Will you be able to quote the approximate price? Regards, Suhas.

Much Props Chuck Singleton sum dope shit doc!

just trying some of the random numbers you have in your pay phone directories on my cell phone, ehhe one person in hawii picked up, its funny when you can make 13 pay phones rings at once . i like visiting this site eery once in awhile!!!. gotta use my free airtime for something on my cellphone.

dude who lives in OC, I live about 40 mins from there, and yeah you are right. fucking PA people. oh yeah ever been to the waterfoul festival in Easton? They really take over the town then, except its weird people and red necks from everywhere. fuckers

dude who lives in OC, I live about 40 mins from there, and yeah you are right. fucking PA people. oh yeah ever been to the waterfoul festival in Easton? They really take over the town then, except its weird people and red necks from everywhere. fuckers

Your lead Atlantic City story brought back some choice memories from my high school years there, in the middle 1960s. A couple friends, Chuck, and I worked night shifts at various motels. During the Winters this was deadly dull, so we sometimes made our own entertainment. This was easier because of the style of motel switchboard in use at the time. Each outside line and very extension had two sockets. The switchboard also had a series of paired cables which could be plugged into any combination of outside lines or extensions to complete an open circuit on those lines. So there were typically six to twelve outside lines, an extension for each room, and one or two dozen cable pairs for completing calls. One entertainment was to call two outside numbers simultaneously, so that they would answer at the same time. We would then just listen to them discuss who had called whom. Sometimes very amusing. When this got old, we would call some outside number at random, and also the 'Aloha' Motel, again so they would answer simultaneously. Then 'Aloha' motel would of course answer 'Aloha', and they would again discuss who had called whom, and wonder who had called to or from Hawaii. (Yeah, we were really bored kids!) Then there was an obnoxious radio call-in talk show host, (I think Pinky Kravitz, but I do not recall his politics). When we didn't like his rants, we would call his lines and put them ALL on hold. He would then go nuts suffering the silence and trying to get his fans excited to call in. Then, just as he took a break to check his lines, we would unplug all the lines & free his circuits. No, we never got caught, & I don't think that the radio guy or the phone company ever figured out what was going on. Not quite the bus terminal story, but that does ‘ring’ true to me! Thanks for bringing out these fun memories.

hee! You said "deadly dull", just like Henry Higgins! 'Enry 'Iggings!

we want to keep in contact with our daughter who is now studying in u.k. we are from gujarat, India what to do? we would like to contact her on mobile phone at cheapest rate? write charges