Scouts on phonecards

[jackbarny 10]

Searching for Boy Scouts on phonecards. If anyone has any for sale please contact me. Thanks jack

[dsteele 20]

Jack:

 

You may be embarking on what will be a journey to a rare collection.

 

When I was a DE, the Field Director came up with the bright idea of selling phone cards with pictures of camp on them to Scouts. The council would get a percentage back when the card was used.

 

We ordered thousands of them. They bombed, big time. So we were stuck with them.

 

The finance director ordered us DE's to use them up rather than letting them expire. We were forbidden to use long distance service, even calling from the council office, and required us to use the phone cards.

 

I can't remember the time on the cards, but each one had a limited amount of time and we had to enter a huge PIN number to use them. We covered a large rural territory so all of us had some long distance every day.

 

I played along. It was a royal pain when you had multiple cards with only a few minutes on them.

 

Conversations would go like this . . .

 

DE talking. DE hears tone in his ear and a feminine voice telling him he has 30 seconds left on the card. DE says, "Mike, my card is about to run out. I'll call you back in a minute and we can talk more about FO . . . (click) S."

 

Oddly enough, Mike wasn't around when I called back with a new card.

 

If I'd been smarter then, I would have used the almost expired calls to talk to the long-winded grousers.

 

DS