264

Yes, kids, phone boxes were real. Don’t listen to what that lying prime minister says. I know it’s hard for you to imagine such a thing now that you’ve all got phones right inside your brain, but in my day people had to use phone boxes if they needed to call someone when they weren’t in their house.

Then, one day, mobile phones got invented. They were a lot like the brain phones of today, except people kept them in their pockets. You won’t remember pockets, but they were part of this thing called trousers which we used to wear over our legs. You’ll need to wiki legs (This isn’t a bio-history lesson!).

Anyway, all of a sudden we had thousands of these redundant phone boxes everywhere. It got the public in a panic. “What will become of BT?” people used to say. They didn’t really do anything about it at first. Their staff just walked around looking pretty depressed all day at the thought of these wasted phone boxes.

Then, in 2012, one of the sons of the British Telecom fat cats came up with an idea; why not advertise phone boxes as something cool and retro like vinyl records?

At the same time, someone had been watching a re-run of Dragons Den, the episode with the guy who covers stuff with 24 karat gold. He thought it would be great publicity stunt to cover every phone box with 24 karat gold. He was the son of one of the fattest big wigged cats, and so, by the time the sun had set, every phone box in Britain was the colour of, and made of, gold.

People didn’t go for it though. Since the decline in phone box usage for phone calls, there’d been a steady rise in the number of people using phone boxes for masturbation. There was a stigma about it. Nobody wanted to be caught phoning someone in a seedy wank box, even if it was made of solid gold.

BT was on the verge of collapse. They’d spent every last penny they had on the Great Gold Phone Box Disaster of the week before. In what was perhaps their darkest hour, a man, a poor man whose parents had never owned a significant share of British Telecom rose up like a blinding light and pondered: “If people are wanking in our boxes, why don’t we charge them for it?”

His words were met with frantic whispers and discussion. “It’ll never work!” “It’s too un-British!” “Could it work?”After hours of heated debate, and many coffees, a strategy was devised. BT needed to convince the British public that public wanking in Britain was as normal as bangers and mash. There was only one way to do it, a lone man, a man the public trusted, a man as British as wanking in a phone box; Bob Hoskins. BT had no money to pay him for his services, but his heart was so attached to the company that he said he’d do it for free. They didn’t even have to ask him. He had been hiding on a window ledge outside the board meeting for the entire duration.

The press caught wind of something stirring over at BT HQ, and pretty soon the only thing anyone was talking about was the new BT advert which was to be aired at 9pm on Sunday night. It was such a huge thing. They even cancelled the Olympics for it, and not just took the Olympics off TV that night; they called the whole event off for good.

When 9pm came and Bob Hoskins finally spoke the words “It’s good to wank”, nothing was ever going to be the same again. The word phone box had left the tongues of the masses, only to be replaced by wank box. People were spending every spare minute they had masturbating in those tiny gold plated sex cathedrals. You couldn’t get through a day at work without hearing one of your colleagues shout “I’m just going on my break down the wank box.”

BT was back on top. Profits had trebled overnight, but BT weren’t the only ones to gain from the wanking hysteria. Masturbation had overtaken sex with married couples for the first time in forty years, and over the next decade the population decreased for the first time in history. Obviously this meant that waiting times for almost anything you can imagine fell dramatically, all except the queue at your nearest wank box. The world was a better place, or at least Britain was.

Sadly it all went wrong on one fateful night, the night on which someone shit inside a London wank box. Once the environmental health and safety brigade discovered the steaming pile of destruction, it was just hours before every wank box in Britain had been closed down. The dream was over. How do I know all this? I was that man who shit in that box.


Old Man Peterson, London.