[knarf]

Many of us learned the value of carrying around a bobby pin with the ends scraped clean of that plastic crap .... so I could stick one end in the speaker end of the handset and the other just ground out somewhere on the phone ....

dial tone !

[tet68]

I remember my landlord who ran a pizza place over my shop
who got caught using a black box. The mafia got him off
and after that the pizza place became an adult book store.

[MayflowerMadam]

I never heard that bobby pin work-around thing before. (How many people now even know what bobby pins are?)

[NewHampshireDuo]

When I was in college (EE of course) we “fixed” the payphone on our dorm floor with a switch between two of the wires to defeat the money collection in the coin box. The coins you put in would come back to the change slot.

Someone reported the phone as out of order and the phone guy came in. At lunch time he asked us if we’d watch the phone. It had the front off. We then found out where the relay arm was and took measurements. It was a simple matter to drill a small hole at that location to close the relay with a paper clip. Then the coins would just go through and come out the change return.

There were a few other tricks involving diodes, etc. Some of the foreign students made free calls back home. Of course, I never did anything like that.

[FrankRizzo890]

And some of us learned to look for phones not belonging to the local Bell company. Once found, dial any 800 number, and when a person answers, tell them "I'm sorry, wrong number!", and wait for them to hang up. Then, dial tone, and free calls! (I know a guy who had an 800 # to a corporate voice mail system, as soon as it answered the phone, he would press '#', and it would hang up). And SOME of us even had small devices that generates "tones" that, when played into the receiver, would simulate coins being dropped in the phone. "Those were the days!"