Checking up on Bell

One day, I happened to notice the pay phone maintenance lady at the corner Donut shop before work.  A half hour later, she was making her rounds, and approached our little pay phone.  Her job was to empty the phone and take the quarters.  We rang the phone, and pretended to be the Bell head office.  We made the comment that we were just checking up on her route, and she was behind schedule.  She immediately knew it was a prank, but we chatted for a bit anyway, teasing her that if she hadn't stopped for donuts' she'd be answering the pay phone down the street by now.  He had her convinced that we'd been trying all the pay phones till she answered.  She didn't know where we were.

The next week, we chatted again, and again the following week.  We didn't catch her every week because I actually did have some work to do occasionally, but we started a good friendship over the years.  It was her that told us the sad news one day that Bell was disabling all their phones from accepting calls. I always kind of wondered if it was because of us.