sightlab

sightlab t1_j3nt9dz wrote

Even in the 90s my grandfather's town in North Carolina was mostly party lines and a small switchboard office downtown handled any out of town calls. Most people were used to just picking up the phone, tapping the hook twice until an operator came on, chatting with them for a little while and then eventually asking to be connected to whoever they were calling. The women (of course) who worked there routinely listened in on calls and grandad's (5th) wife would spend most of her mornings in the phone nook gossiping with the operators and neighbors on the same party line, expressing shock at the news in her formal lilting southern debutante voice.

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sightlab t1_j3ns81i wrote

My mom proudly kept her wired rotary phones well into the 2000s, until she realized pulse dialing service cost MORE once digital, touch-tone became standard. I also remember that we had a big regional AT&T building in town, you could peer in the windows of the back room where the mechanical switchers were and watch the rods of the switchers moving up and down because someone somewhere was dialing.

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sightlab t1_j25jo0e wrote

There was one in the Hampshire Mall when the Hampshire Mall was thriving and had a food court that looked like an old-timey town square (with Steigers as the big central feature store) and the adjacent West Mountain Farms mall (or, colloquially, the "DEAD MALL") was an empty husk with 1 chinese restaurant, 1 AMC muliplex, and a sunday flea market in the massive anchor space at the end. Now the West Farms area is the thriving (if awful) walmart/wholefoods/barnes & noble/old navy etc plaza and the Hampshire Mall is an increasingly empty anachronism that folks now refer to as the DEAD MALL.

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sightlab t1_iynbopy wrote

I went to Deerfield Academy, one of the most exclusive, elitist private prep schools in the country. The current king of Jordan was one of my classmates. Mom worked in the alumni outreach office, I had a full tuition pass even though we were distinctly lower middle class.
Which, fat side note, most of my peers looked down upon with palpable disdain. I got in on potential and talent, so many of them were legacy acceptances.

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sightlab t1_iujd7tg wrote

Sure, and they guy breaking the car window may just want to get his wife’s purse off the front seat and grab all the change out of his own cup holder. But statistically speaking these people doing drastic crime-like things are, more often than not, not doing them for legitimate reasons.
But hey, Boston is a very special city. And I say this as a native masshole. Maybe that’s just how Bostonians do things differently. Who am I to judge from my lofty Berkshire perch?

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