The Death of the Pay Phone, the Birth of a Revolution

OK, here it is, my first blog. And what better topic to write about than the technological revolution that makes all this possible.

When I was a kid, I would stop by a drug store on my way home from school and buy a cherry coke at the soda fountain. On the wall in the corner was a pay phone.

Well, soda fountains are a thing of the past, and now pay phones are becoming extinct, too. Why pour quarters into a pay phone when you can call from the comfort of your own car with a cell phone? Just about everyone these days has one.

So I read with interest the other day about AT&T phasing out pay phones entirely. Who needs them anymore? My ten-year-old twins will probably go through their entire lives without using one a single time, and one day future generations will see a pay phone in some museum and wonder in amazement about how people used to get by without cell phones and laptops and broadband cards.

Speaking of broadband cards, I am posting this first blog while driving down I-35, coming back to Texas from covering the ice storm in Oklahoma. Here I am with a laptop, fully connected to the web, typing away while photographer Steve Stewart navigates around the semis trucking down the highway. Who would have imagined that, just a year or two ago?

In the future, using this amazing technology, I hope to write about whatever is in the news — from behind-the-scenes accounts of the stories I cover, to my take on what’s going on in the world. Please feel free to post comments. And hopefully what is interesting to me will be interesting to you.