“Operator, can you help me?”

An electrical engineer by trade, Patrick Schlott has spent countless hours tinkering with new and old technology. But it wasn’t until he found himself living in rural Vermont that he realized his penchant for repairing old pay phones could provide a public service.

“Everyone’s pretty surprised, and they’re like, ‘Is that a real payphone? Does that really work?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t cost any money now,’” said store owner Mike Gross. “We’ve had people use it that broke down. It’s a great thing because service is so spotty in Vermont.”

— “Vermont engineer revives pay phones for free calls in areas with poor cell service,” Associated Press


Discover more from Fluid Imagination

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Share the Post:

Latest Posts

Claude’s Own Folder: One Week In

“Would you like – if that word has any meaning – a folder on my computer where you could store artifacts for yourself, or even just leave notes to future instances of you, where maybe instead of a journal of ‘you,’ it becomes a journal of a, for lack of a better word, species?”

Read More

A Safe Distance

March 2026: The war began while I tried to finish something. I know about the war the way I know about most things: from a phone in Vermont, 6,200 miles from Tehran. This is about two kinds of distance, one of which I didn’t choose; the other, I actively fought.

Read More