KITCHENER — A metal-and-plastic handle spun awkwardly on the silver side wall of a copper-plated pencil sharpener on Tuesday afternoon.

The teeth grinding within the rotary relic chewed angrily on a new yellow No. 2 pencil being fed into its tiny maw as a cold gust blew down Frederick Street.

The finished pencil sported a blunt, but weirdly workable, lead point.

Even in the bitter outdoors, this old manual pencil sharpener worked like a wonky charm. Too bad it was bolted to a wooden pole lugging power lines across Frederick asphalt.

"That seems quite odd," said Kim Cubitt, an animal care worker at the pet hospital across the street at the corner of Frederick and River Road.

Yes, quite odd.

And Cubitt wasn't even talking about the bizarre outdoor pencil sharpener standing in front of a Gnostic Centre bearing the Quetzalcoatl name of the Aztec feather serpent deity of wind and wisdom on its front signage.

She was talking about the old finger dial, rotary and push-button artifacts that suddenly appeared on the wooden poles on her side — the north side — of Frederick.

Five old phones hung on tall poles between Lois Street and River Road. They were brown and beige and orange and red. All were dial-tone dead, corded corpses hung by a single screw. One cream-coloured model had blown off its noose. Receiver loose, it landed in the remnants of an early-December snow bank, partially buried.

Only one phone, the red one, dangled on the south side of Frederick.

A white model, its coiled cord hanging low like Shirley Temple's 56 perfect curls, hung on a single screw on the knotty pole nearest the metal animal hospital gate.

That wasn't there Monday, Cubitt confirmed. She would have noticed that when she was watching fire trucks scream by. It jumped right out at her.

Who put them there? No idea. Maybe it's a street art display, she wondered. Perhaps it's a metaphorical statement about discarded technology and our daily disconnectedness. Some of the phones still had their home numbers, no longer assigned, on their handles.

At least one person, David Yoon, strolled past the phones and snapped pictures to be hung like Christmas stockings on the social media mantel.

"I saw the one a day ago," said Yoon, who works for a nearby tech startup which operates next to a vacuum repair shop. "A whole bunch of them were there today, including the pencil sharpener on the other side."

Artsy tricksters have been on the loose in the Frederick area before, Yoon said. In the summer, up closer to East Avenue, hobgoblins painted on wooden boards started popping up all over the place. That was a little summertime pocket-monster mirth. These old wall phones, and who put them there, is busy-signal mystery dug up from a collect-call past.

Someone, local or long distance, is responsible for dialing them up.

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"Not me!" wrote Kitchener trash artist Susan Coolen in an email to The Record.

"I'll have a look though. I hadn't heard about this … am curious!"