Mother Bell's Migraine

One of the most famous multibillion-dollar companies is harassed by a ten-cent problem. Too many of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.'s pay phones are out of commission, having been pulled, kicked or picked apart by vandals and thieves. Last year A.T. & T. lost $3,000,000 to them and spent another $10 million repairing and replacing many of its 1,200,000 pay phones. That amounted to less than one-tenth of 1% of Mother Bell's revenues. The far greater cost is the incalculable loss of esteem in the eyes of people who wonder why they cannot make a call.

(The trouble is common in Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and Boston. Nowhere is it so acute as in New York, where an average 35,000 of the city's 100,000 pay phones are wrecked monthly. New York Telephone Co. last year lost nearly $1,000,000 in coins and spent $4,000,000 on repairs. The city's sidewalk phones are the worst hit: at least 25% are out of order all the time. At train stations, on subway platforms and in entire neighborhoods, it is sometimes impossible to find a working phone.

Guerrilla Warfare. Most of the losses and breakdowns are caused by professional thieves. They pick the lock of the coin box or stuff the coin chute with thin pieces of paper and after several would-be callers have dropped in their coins, retrieve the money. Last year one thief admitted that he habitually got into 20 to 30 pay phones a day and earned $20,000 annually. Less sophisticated professionals often smash the telephones or rip them out and carry them away. Plain spiteful vandalism also accounts for an increasing number of broken phones. Teen-agers rip out wires or steal receivers and dials just for perverse fun or an adolescent sign of protest. Some psychologists see similarities between the wrecking of telephones and the destruction of school property or cars (see BEHAVIOR). Such acts are believed to be caused, in part, by what psychologists call "the feeling of anonymity" that stimulates teen-agers and others to destroy property.

New York Telephone is waging what one official describes as "constant guerrilla warfare" to outguess the vandals and thieves. The company has begun to introduce stronger coin boxes and armored cables on pay phones. To reduce privacy, some telephone booths are gradually being replaced by open telephone stands in high-risk areas. Last month the company started sending out a "flying squad," whose 102 members patrol by foot, motor scooter, truck and station wagon to track down out-of-order coin phones. It used to take an average of four days to spot a broken phone; now the company claims that the breakdowns are reported in only two days. Still, weeks sometimes elapse before repairs can be made. As yet, the petty thieves have not been forced to go back to robbing poor boxes and penny gum machines.

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