Americans tend to fetishize England’s phone boxes. Those red contraptions that house pay phones is a favorite photo opportunity for any foreigner visiting the country. But like pay phones in the United States, a phone box has lost its cultural importance as a necessary day-to-day tool. Well here is a story about how a random smoke session saved a women’s life.
This is what caused someone on London’s Reddit board to question when was the last time anyone had used a phone box. Some spoke of desperately using a phone box after their cell phone had died while others used to step into the box to make prank calls. But one Redditor told the story of when he passed a ringing phone box and a woman asked him if he liked to smoke weed.
I went to her flat which was only a street away. She opened the door and let me in. We smoked weed and chatted until the early hours of the morning before falling asleep.
She was an attractive Italian lady in her late forties but we didn’t have sex or anything like that. It wasn’t that kind of vibe. We just talked.
From his point of view, it was obvious the woman was in a difficult place. Her son had just been in a fatal car crash, and the woman was discussing suicidal thoughts. Amidst their smoke session, the man “held her and talked her out of ending her own life.”
The two stayed in touch over the years, sharing a drink or smoke together, until the woman reconnected with an ex-boyfriend in Italy, whom she eventually married. The Redditor was invited to wedding but had to cancel due to work obligations.
You may be wondering why answer the phone, why enter a random woman’s flat who was offering you weed. Well, Repugnice responded to another Reddit user who asked such questions. He was working construction at the time. After locking up, he was headed to the pub when the phone rang.
It did cross my mind that it might be as scam and that I was very stupid to be going to some random persons flat in the middle of the night but it was such a bizarre scenario that curiosity got the better of me.
Thankfully he did. His random, “bizarre” smoke session with this woman likely saved her life. You can read the full thread here.
