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From: dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com (David Tamkin)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Public*Phone
Message-ID: <9530@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 9 Jul 90 02:04:33 GMT
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Organization: TELECOM Digest
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 470, Message 2 of 10


In TELECOM Digest, Volume 10, Issue 468, John Higdon wrote:

| An amusing COCOT incident:

| Needing to reach Pac*Bell over some matters with my residence phone, I
| spotted what looked like a standard Pac*Bell pay phone. It turned out
| to be a [Public*Phone] (tm) with colors and logos that are borderline
| actionable in their resemblance to Pac*Bell. They have blue rectangles
| in the upper left corner and an embossed logo on the coinbox cover
| that from more than ten feet away looks exactly like the puckered
| asshole logo of Pac*Bell.

Around metropolitan Chicago, COCOTs originally looked like something
untoward, but after a while all new ones installed were made to appear
deceptively similar to Illinois Bell coin phones.  One frequently has
to get close enough to see that the logo in the white space in the
upper left of the card is not IBT's before recognizing one of the
buggers for sure.

The guise backfires in Centel's satrapy, where telco pay stations have
a distinctive boxy solid brown or gray housing and a prominent
instruction card in a different position from the IBT payphones and
the COCOTs.  Since there don't seem to be any COCOTs manufactured to
look like the pay phones of independent telqi, the COCOTs in Centel
territory (usually outside gasoline stations or inside restaurants,
but far sparser than in IBT country) stick out like sore thumbs.


David Tamkin  Box 7002  Des Plaines IL  60018-7002  708 518 6769  312 693 0591
MCI Mail: 426-1818  GEnie: D.W.TAMKIN  CIS: 73720,1570   dattier@ddsw1.mcs.com