Scene: a dead body is sprawled facedown on the sidewalk.  Yellow police tape cordons off the area.  Two detectives are squatting down near the body talking to the medical examiner.  A witness says that the victim was walking down the street when a car came around the corner, hit the person, and drove off in a hurry.

A uniformed cop comes up and says, “Detectives, we found a call placed from the payphone across the street at the same time our victim was murdered.”

The detectives trade a knowing glance: this is no accident.

Can you spot the error in this scenario?  It’s quite obvious when you look for it.

Where the hell do they still have payphones?

Maybe I just live in a city where they have removed them all, but I haven’t seen a payphone for years.  I haven’t had to carry change around since sophomore year in high school when I needed to call home after soccer practice.

Quick: your cellphone is dead, and apparently all the normal landlines around you are, oh I don’t know, covered in ants or something.  Where is the nearest payphone for you to make an emergency call to your favorite take-out Chinese place?  You don’t know, do you?

I used to laugh at old folks who thought making a call from a payphone cost a dime.  I’d scoff and shake my head and say, you fools, it costs 25 cents now.  Then they went and upped it to 35 cents, and frankly I hated that you had to have a dime and a quarter because I never had a dime.  Then apparently it went up to 50 cents, but nobody cared anymore because it was easier to ask your friend who had rich parents that gave them a cell phone.

Remember that phone they had?  It was the size of three Snickers bars taped together, with an antenna that was about the size of the one on your car, and had a screen that was capable of only showing grayscale numbers.  But it was so freaking cool and you were jealous.

The only thing payphones are used for now are cliches in crime dramas, and now that “Law & Order” is off the air, hopefully even that one will go away.

Scene: the uniformed cop comes up to the detectives and says, “Detectives, we traced a call to a Skype account on an iPhone in a mobile hotspot not far from here!”