[Symbiote]

In about 1999, on holiday with my parents in the USA, we had to make a long-distance call from a payphone (somewhere in the Rocky Mountains to Michigan, or something like that). I remember helping my dad to feed in the quarters as fast as possible, as the huge cost of the call — $6 or something — plus the low value of American coins meant the machine rejected the call before we could pay for it.

On about the third or fourth try, an operator came on the line! I guess that's a real "intercept". I don't remember what he did, he spoke to my dad, but the call was made.

(We were on a very long road trip, and there was some problem with the car we'd borrowed from American relatives.)