We were very sad to read about the removal of phones from all dorm rooms. Apparently, the administration feels no one was using them. No hard data about usage was reported in the CT, which makes us skeptical that they were really “unplugged” and “kept in drawers.” Nonetheless, we’d like to pay tribute to the dorm phone upon which we relied so many times for convenience, practicality and entertainment.
Yes, we all had cell phones. But the dorm phone came in handy in so many ways. It’s hard to believe that no one on campus takes advantage of all that the dorm phone has to offer. It saved cell minutes when making local calls. The speakerphone was excellent, and you could always give that annoying guy a 2-7-4 number and sound legit. But the two main reasons we loved them: prank calls and 4-CAST.
Use of a campus phone isn’t all about practicality. If necessity breeds innovation, then the necessity to not lose one’s mind while stuck inside on a cold day led to creative prank calls that passed the time and created inside jokes that our friends recall and quote today. “You’re a Libra, aren’t you darling?” and “Yeah, that’s the daddy,” were all common phrases we could expect to hear on the other end of the line when our friends prank called with the Miss Cleo Soundboard.
Dorm phones were even used to prank call the CT office. When the CT spelled Vassar wrong on a back page headline, a friend made a convincing call to the editor-in-chief, complaining that he was from Vassar and that the paper must issue a correction.
On a somewhat more practical note, you could always count on Josh Veazey ’04 to provide you with an up-to-date weather report. Every morning, he would update 4-CAST with all you needed to know about the weather, including the extended forecast, guest meteorologists and “Musical Thursdays.” Somehow, Josh always brightened your day, even when his report called for 30 inches of snow. If you’re curious what the weather was like for Commencement 2004, give 4-CAST a call at (585) 274-2278, since you no longer have a dorm phone. There must be someone on campus who wants to start this up again (if you’re interested, we think the mailbox belongs to WRUR).
In all seriousness, how can the administration eliminate phones from dorm rooms? At a time when parents are forced to make tough decisions about what they can afford when sending their children to an expensive school like UR, the cell phone might be considered a luxury. It is irresponsible for the University to assume that everyone has a cell phone, and to ignore the value of being connected to the UR community through a university-wide system of communication.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Daniel Rowen // Sep 17, 2009 at 9:56 am
Man, I miss Josh Veazey’s WRUR Weather 4-CAST, so much better than 4-TEMP (which is just an automated woman telling you the temperature and time). But in all seriousness, campus phones were highly useful for me as ResNet employee. We’d get calls from all over campus, always from their dorm phone, and could trouble shoot with them, or even see where the call was coming from so we could test their port without having to even ask where they lived.
All around campus are phones, we would use them when locked out of a dorm late at night after our cards stopped working. Are they also taking the phones off of the sides of the buildings??
My parents and family would all call me on my dorm phone, or leave me voicemail there, and I was glad to not be bothered while in class, or waste my daytime minutes for an incoming call. It would have been nicer to just drop the calling plan from every phone and just make students sign up for some nominal fee, you’d think with how much housing costs that ResLife could afford to just keep the existing phones in each room. Aren’t public phones a big enough health hazard to avoid going back to the 70’s when my dad went to UR and they had a phone in the hallway?
2 David Selby // Sep 17, 2009 at 11:02 am
It is absurd that ResLife is too cheap to either just drop the local calling plans or to simply provide residents with campus phones. It would be like ITS removing CLARC and taking out all the computer labs because now most, if not all, students come to school with a computer.
3 Sylvia // Sep 19, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Students can request to have the phones put back in their rooms if they want them.
Leave a Comment