Most of the time, I'm all for the advancement of technology. The majority of the time, each new invention is a tremendous improvement over its predecessor. The computer beats out the typewriter, which in turn beats out the pen. The DVD is arguably better than the VHS tape, but TiVo trounces both of them. The digital camera overshadows the film camera, hands down.

Still, I can't help but feel nostalgic for one rapidly disappearing piece of technology: the pay phone.

The pay phone is one of those things that, in this day and age, is hard to wrap your head around. Before the cell phone, you had to be "home" to receive a call. And as soon as you left your property, you'd become unreachable to anyone who couldn't actually see you. But here and there around town were oases where for a coin or two, you could jack back into the telecommunications grid.

This idea, to me, is kind of romantic. In a way, the pay phone is a lot like the vinyl record in that its accidental aesthetics counterbalance its old-fashioned clunkiness.

One of my all-time favorite pay phones was located in the lobby of my junior high school. There are few places that are more oppressive than a junior high, and that phone was the one link to the outside world where things were free and normal. Usually, people would use it to call kids who were home sick (a la Ferris Beuller's Day Off) and since I was sick more often than anyone else, I'd get calls from school all the time. I always wanted to be able to call in to that phone, and I even wrote down the number so that I could try it, but it didn't work. That didn't keep me from trying it every time I was absent.

Another great phone was in the campground at Jay Cooke State Park. That one was fun to use because it was on a short little pole and felt like it was in the middle of the woods. Calling people from the woods! What a crazy idea! We used this one a lot as teens when we were "driving around." We'd say, "Let's stop at the Best Phone Ever and call Bob." It was something to do.

In college, there were two public phones in the building where most of my classes were: a pay phone and a free phone. Even though it cost 25 cents, I often chose to use the pay phone because it was more private and because it was inside of a really cool wooden phone booth. You could talk for hours there and no one would interrupt you. The free phone was kind of awesome, too because it was inside a cylindrical phone booth that had a sliding door. Once, a woman who annoyed the hell out of me used that phone, but forgot how the door worked once she was inside. The panicked look on her face as she pounded on the door is still etched in my brain, and still makes me smile. Eventually, someone let her out. Not me.

When I got my first job with the USPS, I worked in a newly built facility that had nine pay phones all along one wall of the break room. It wasn't unusual for all the phones to be in use, and there were signs saying to limit your calls to 5 minutes if there were people waiting. Often the phones were out of order because the coin boxes were full. A few short years later, no one ever used the phones. A few years after that, the facility closed due to technological advances.

For a while, I had a working pay phone inside my apartment. But alas, I no longer have a land line. I still have the phone, though, and I use it for a bank.

I've never used the pay phone outside of Last Chance Liquor on Fourth Street, but I drive by it all the time and it's still frequently in use. There's a certain attitude you have to have when you use that phone. First off, you need to have a scowl on your face. Second, you need to constantly scan the traffic on Fourth Street, presumably to make sure no one is watching you. Pacing and smoking cigarettes is key. Look paranoid, jittery, and guilty, and you'll do fine.