Requiem for the Phone Booth (Retro Ficlets Challenge)

Ever think about unintended consequences?

Take that friend you carry around in your pocket. The little guy you flip open whenever you feel like talking to someone, no matter where you are, or texting them in cryptic abbreviationspeak.

Nobody ever expected, back in the day when the first bulky, boxy radiotelephones came to the consumer market, that eventually its descendants—those ubiquitous, slick plastic wedges—would kill off a century-old institution. But everybody who has a cellphone doesn’t need to use a payphone anymore. So now pay telephones are going away, and with them go the telephone booths.

So now those phone booths you used to see on every street corner are sitting in junkyards, alone and forlorn, exposed to the elements and slowly decaying. A little sad, isn’t it? But that’s progress.

If a little thing like the cellphone can kill something we used to take for granted like the phonebooth, who knows what will be next to go?