Goodbye to pay phones

The latest casualty of the Information Age is pay phones.

If you feel sad or nostalgic about this loss … get over it. Cell phones are 100 times better.

And it is cell phones that are sending pay phones and phone booths to the history books along with manual typewriters, elevator operators, restroom attendants, etc.

On Tuesday AT&T announced it will disconnect its pay-phone operations in 2008.

A spokesman, speaking the obvious, said, “Usage has just dropped so much — precipitously.”

If you have an IQ larger than your waist size, you had to see this coming.

Cell phones are everywhere. Kids have ’em. Grandmas and grandpas have ’em. Even poor people have ’em.

(Though in America, poor people also have color TVs, air-conditioning, home computers, etc., but that’s another blog.)

I suppose some people have fond memories of phone booths and will moan about the clunky old contraptions.

I’m not one of them. Whenever I had to use a pay phone, I was worried about catching a disease from the filthy thing or having the correct change.

Gimme a cell phone anytime. Sure, we overuse those babies too. We wonder how we lived just a few years ago when we didn’t have one on our hip all the time. (Somehow, we survived.)

The only downside is that anyone who has passed puberty has another thing to explain to kids who ask in the future, “Uh … what, like, was a phone booth used for in, like, the old days?”