The 10 Lessons I learned from a Brazilian Payphone! "Orelhao"

*The facts described in the chronicle are a mix of real and fake facts, mixed in different time lapse so I try to make the reading more fun and attractive I hope you all enjoy

I grew up in a middle class suburban of Campinas, an important city of Brasil, yes Brazil is written with S in my mother tongue! Campinas is well known in my country because of Unicamp & PUC, two of the most prestigious universities of my country, a lot of my professional colleagues, bosses and friends, studied in one of these 2 universities. Unfortunately not my case, I studied at UNIP a later comer university that received pretty well students like myself, my brother and my wife, who used to work during the day and study during the night, maybe I should say fortunately, so I met my wife who I'm married since 2001, 16 years of an engineering love!

Anyway, let's go back to my relationship with a Payphone! First of all let me explain, in my country, Payphone is also called Orelhao, or Big Ears!!! Yeah, that is the cute nickname of Payphones in Brazil, if you see the picture on the banner of this post you will easily understand why Brazilians call Payphone by Orelhao!!! By the way, a lot of bullying happened in the schools using this symbol of big ears, and only after we grew up we realized that wasn't a good thing to do.

So, going back to my Orelhao, I lived in a complex of apartments, to be exact an MDU with 24 blocks, each block with 3 floors and 4 living units per floor, so around 3x4x24=288 living units of working class families, it means more or less 4x288=1152 people living inside the same fence!!!

That was a lot of people and we, kids, had a lot of fun playing around, but if I recall in my memory, I always see that Payphone, a Payphone seating beside the bus station that I used to get to go to the school everyday. I use to spend easily 30 minutes everyday of my entire childhood listening to the talks happening in the Payphone.

People from northeast of Brazil would call the Payphone and request for whoever answering the phone, sometimes even myself, to call their relatives who left their cities to try a better life in the southeast of Brazil.

Or a guy would call his girlfriend living in another neighborhood of Campinas and could stay hours talking while the line was growing to use the Payphone.

Or it could be just someone trying to book an appointment in the doctor. 1000s and 1000s of stories happened in that Payphone and I was a witness of those facts, while waiting for my bus.

I think that was the trigger for my passion to CONNECT PEOPLE around the world!

Probably because of that Payphone I started my carrier in the Telecom Industry where I'm since 1994, and where I saw a lot of Technology evolution.

So, beyond my love to the power of instantaneously bring together the world via remote communication what else the Payphone teached me.

That Payphone teached me a lot of concepts that nowadays looks like quite helpful:

1. Inflation - My childhood was during the worst decade of Brazilian economy, during those days the bills in your wallet could lose value overnight, everyday pricing machines were stamping new prices in the products, we use to buy food cans with dozens of tags showing different prices. In this type of environment the Payphone coins worked like hedges, I used to buy several coins and resell to my friends on the price of the day, so I could have a type of money in my hands that wouldn't lose value. Great personal finance lesson for my life!
2. Real Time Charging - When I first asked myself what was the first time I worked with a Real Time Charging, or PrePaid solution, I thought it was in 1998 when I helped to implement a solution for a Mobile Operator starting operation in Campinas, firstly an ISUP loopback solution which we migrate to IS-41E later on, but then I realized, NO, again my childhood Payphone was actually my first PrePaid solution, what could be more Real Time Charging than that Payphone coin going down immediately after X minutes of conversation and the call being dropped because I had no more credits on the coins?
3. Hacking & Fraud - Firstly I learned how to hack the system, a simple diode could block the charging signals coming from the switch and I could stay talking for hours using only when coin, but then I learned with my Mom, that's wasn't a good thing to do because I was defrauding the system and so I should work hard now to find way to fix the breach becoming a white hat hacker!
4. Mobility/Convenience - In some sense that Payphone also showed me how voice communication could be convenient and mobile, I could use any Payphone in the streets, wherever I was with the same coin I bought to use that neighborhood Payphone of my bus station right? Isn't it Mobile and convenient?
5. Pricing Plans - When we buy a Payphone coin, we are actually buying a plan, Local Calls coin use to have a different price than the Long distance Calls, clearly a pricing plan type of solution.
6. Innovation - Talking about innovation, can you believe we could make direct calls from any Payphone in Brazil without really need a coin? And without need talk to someone who would ask authorization to the called party to pay? Yes, in Brazil that is called Automatic Collect Call solution, you just need dial specific digits before the call and the called party knows by an announcement message they will pay for the call if they accept it! Isn't it great?
7. Social Networks / Dating Applications - You really believe Tinder or Chat Room applications are really innovative? No, when I was little kid I could dial 146 and get into a conference call, or equivalent to a chat room where people with common subject could talk simultaneously with several people, isn't it way similar to the applications you're using today?
8. Erlang - Payphones have the highest occupation among all type of connections, with almost 100% during busy hours. One of my Masters, Aldemar Parola, when day took precious 10 minutes to explain me the concept of Erlang formula, or percentage of occupation of a 2-ways circuit and when I remembered the line of people during the busy hour waiting to use the Payphone I immediately associated that line with the Erlang formula!
9. Least Cost Routing - In Brazil, we can select the carrier of a long distance call by dialing a carrier selection code as part of the dialled number, we give the end user the opportunity to chose the least cost routing!
10. Location Based Services - That I learned in a very bad way, I was playing with my friends around the Payphone when we decide to dial 190 (Or 911), yes, just to make fun to the police department, not good, in 10 minutes there was a police car nearby us chasing who made the joke! I realized that Payphone address could easily be located!

So, if like the reading, look around you, observe what's going on because you may realized there are people, things, animals that could be teaching something new that could transform your life, you all have a nice week!