People left baffled by strange chair found in Hawaiian home... but the odd feature has a simple explanation
Reddit user DesertDiegel shared a photo of the piece of furniture on the forum r/whatisthisthing, where people post pictures of unknown things they want identified.
The user wrote: 'What is this chair thing? Wood, small adult/child size, Found at The Plantation House by Gaylord's (Hawaii).'
The chair in the image has what looks to be half a seat, with the other half being some sort of shelf.
Redditors were quick to point out that what the original poster had stumbled upon was a telephone bench.
More colloquially referred to as a 'gossip bench', this kind of chair allows the user to sit and have the telephone resting on the attached ledge.
'Now I feel really old... I've used one like this my entire childhood and teens. It's a phone desk,' one person wrote.
'I have one! It belonged to my great grandmother and has an extra little shelf for telephone books and notepads,' another person excitedly commented.
Most telephone benches were made in the 1920s through the 1950s and were often placed in hallways of people's homes since most families only had one phone back then.
As home telephones got smaller and less awkward to use, the need for telephone benches gradually waned.
And when cordless telephones were invented in the 1980s, the gossip could literally be taken anywhere, making the furniture completely obsolete.
However, many telephone benches are now considered antique collectors items.
One made in the 1930s is being sold on Etsy for $1,195, as one Redditor pointed out.
'That price! Guess I shouldn't have dumped mine at a yard sale years ago,' someone reacted.
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'Or they may just need a backpack and then you'll never see them again. And then some families need more ongoing support – maybe they need help with food.' The school staff can assist families of homeless students find housing, and have grants to help put a deposit on an apartment or pay rental arrears 'so they don't become homeless', said Smith. School staff are trained to recognize signs of housing instability and to notify teachers who can modify assignments. 'We know that kids living in shelters can't always do their homework – it's loud,' she said, so academic expectations can be adjusted. Smith has seen families living doubled-up two or more families sharing a home, often crammed into single rooms, converted garages or worse. 'Sometimes there's a couple of families living together, sometimes three,' she explains. 'I've seen converted garages – or unconverted ones – where a whole family is living.' Homelessness here cuts across employment and immigration status. 'These are not necessarily children of migrant families,' Smith emphasizes. 'Maybe their families are sick, or they lost a job, or they do have a job, but it's not enough to pay the rent.' In Monterey county, about 13% of homeless students are migrants compared with the average of about 3% statewide. In some agricultural pockets around Salinas, Smith said the situation was even more dire. 'I know they had families staying in hothouses,' she said, referring to an incident in 2023 where a farmer was fined for having illegally converted greenhouses into makeshift housing for some 100 people, including many women and children as young as two. 'There were many, many families living together in those. They got shut down because it's illegal.' 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All pandemic-era federal funding that helped school districts identify and support homeless children expired this school year leaving uncertainty about not only the future of resources, but school districts' ability to accurately track how many students are in need of them. 'I suspect that the numbers [of homeless students] will probably go down as we lose our ability to identify these students,' said PPIC's Brett Guinan. 'If they don't have funding for separate staff to track them down or for additional hours for their current staff, the ability to capture the complete picture is limited, even if the schools are trying their best.' In Monterey county, the worry for homeless students who are undocumented isn't just food, clothes or accurate headcounts – it's whether Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids will drive them out of school entirely. 'Our kids are fearful. Our families are fearful, and as these Ice raids ramp up, I can tell you, we are going to see our attendance at school in the fall decline,' said Dr Deneen Guss, superintendent of schools serving Monterey county's 72,000 students. 'We already know it's going to happen because we're hearing families saying they don't wanna go to the doctor. They don't wanna leave their house.' Brigitte's family used to spend most of their days outside the house at parks, but with the fear of Ice raids, they have been spending more time cooped at home. Nancy loves baking desserts and decorative jellos and dreams of a real kitchen, rather than the kitchenette of her converted garage. Cruz dreams of a house with a big yard and a fireplace, but isn't holding his breath. 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