An Invitation to Waste Some Time

An Invitation to Waste Some Time 
**Inciting Incident: Word on the Street**
I had an interaction with some folks several months ago. It's around 0230, and I'm waiting for a bus back  from the bar alone. Two guys across the street notice me and start to come over, asking if they can use my phone. Naturally, I assume I'm about to get robbed.

The guys explain they were out drinking, and suddenly one of the their cards was declined. It was cash out of a social assistance fund of some kind, and he wanted to call them to figure out what was going on, since apparently there should have been more money in there.

They both notice I'm in a "Fuck, I'm about to get robbed and I don't want to give them my phone" state of readiness, so the one guy asks if I'd be comfortable dialling this number on speakerphone so they wouldn't need to hold my phone. I wasn't expecting that. The bus wasn't coming for another 30 min, I figured if I was getting robbed it would've happened by this point, and it seemed like a way to kill the time and help someone out. So I said sure. He gives me the number, rhymes out the options and id number info I need, and we enter the queue.

For the next 30 minutes, I'm waiting with these guys on hold, shooting the shit with them punctuated with that intense, sudden silence when we think a human may pick up, and instead get told our call is important to ... well, whoever the hell I dialed, I still wasn't sure about that. 

The guy with the card problem was 'living a lifestyle that put him between homes' (his words), grew up in a family in one of the nicer areas in town, and before whatever lifestyle choices led him to this moment liked the bar I had come from. We chatted about the band I saw that night, some shared experiences as residents of the city, etc. This included the obvious question of "Have you called this number before this late at night, and actually had someone answer?", which he claimed he did.

The other guy was ... erratic. No shirt, tattoos, pacing around and tossing random comments once and a while. I dropped my bus pass at one point, and he asked what it was. I told him, and he paced back into the bus shelter and screamed "WHY CAN'T I HAVE NICE THINGS?". He started to cry a little. I had no fucking idea what to do with this, and the other guy was just ignoring it, so I followed suit.

About 15-20 minutes in, I figure "My bus comes soon, at this point I imagine folks just need to crash, I have like $12 in loonies and I got paid yesterday". So I give the guys my change, saying it's theirs either way but asking if it's enough to get where ever they need to go. Before card guy could respond, erratic guys steps forward to collect. He says it's not, but enough to grab some ice cream from a nearby McDonalds. He says he'll be back, and disappears. Thinking back about the look on card guy's face, he knew he wasn't coming back. It took me another 5 minutes to clue in.

I had, ultimately, been robbed - it just took a lot longer than usual, it was for $12, and it was more-or-less of my own volition.

Eventually, I see my bus coming down the road. I tell the guy I had to go, and I'm sorry he wasn't able to connect with whoever. I still had some change, so I give the guy a buck in quarters, and tell him there's a payphone a couple blocks away if he wanted to try again. He thanks me for my time, and we go our separate ways.

On the ride home, I can't help but think "If you're an organization who supplies folks with emergency funding or whatever, why on earth do you not have a toll-free number?"

**On Payphones and Tolls**

If you're of a certain age, you probably have some memory about using payphones. They were *the* method of mobile communication before cellphones were widely adopted. Since then, they have slowly been phased out, and the few that remain are either completely invisible in the minds of folks, or stick out as weird anachronisms. I'm reminded of that comic where a guy from the future finds a surgical mask on the ground, chuckles about what a weird time that was, then turns to face his current reality which is much, much weirder.

In 2012, a local radio show asked "where are all of the payphones in the city?" Folks submitted pictures and coordinates, and came up with about 100 phones. It was assumed there were more that weren't documented. Whatever their number is today, it's probably lower than what it was then.

While everyone remembers having to pay some toll to use a payphone, what sometimes gets forgotten is it's free to call, well, toll-free numbers. I personally know this really well. 

Toll free numbers from payphones are how I'd check my bank balance at 0400 on payday many years ago, waiting to make sure I had enough money to get a breakfast/dinner from the place that opened at 0500 when I worked nights, was in overdraft due to bank fees, stealing unreliable wifi from my neighbours and my cell service was suspended - every aspect a product of piss-poor decisions. The sounds coming through the line were little whispers of hope: soon, very soon, I'd hear the number that meant I'd get a good meal, and some time to think about how to fix the other problems so I wouldn't have to do this again.

Sometimes, I'd be confirmed set by 0400. Other times, the money wouldn't come through until later in the day. This only lasted for a couple months, but it's an experience burned in my memory.

So too is an earlier one, wandering around as a kid looking for ways to kill time. Other kids with the same ends shared salacious or weird toll-free numbers you could call from a payphone if you were bored. Strange voicemail messages, steamy preamble to giving other, decidedly *not* toll-free numbers - it was free, it was entertaining, and it was this strange mix of public and private activity. The most weird thing you could in public while looking completely normal to passersby. 

What do you think of when you see someone using a payphone today - if you see anyone doing that?  Do you wonder who they're calling, and if they're paying for that?

**Voicemails from The Underground**

Another thing I've been thinking about lately is the idea of 'The Underground'. You know the idea - folks in a sort of secret community of other folks in the know. 60s radicals, terrorist cells, gangs, indie hip-hop artists, zine makers,  whatever. Your thoughts about 'The Underground', as a concept, will vary depending on what kind of people come to mind first as participants. 

In particular, I think of a quote from Warren Ellis' *Crooked Little Vein* (it's a fun book, I recommend it):

*Consider this, though. If I've seen it on the Internet, is it still underground? 'Underground'
always connoted something hidden, something difficult to see and find. Something underneath the surface of things, yes? But if it's on the Internet [...] it cannot possibly be underground. [...] How can something on the world's electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream? It's easily found. [...] It's not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online. That's not underground. It's mainstream. Just like me."*

The internet has been, among other things, a boon to niche communities of all stripes, moving ideas once at the margins of society into popular consciousness.

It also has a flattening effect - everything can be found. Almost anything you can think of a human doing, someone is doing it and putting material about it on line for public consumption. Locality is generally irrelevant. Participation, in some respects, is also irrelevant. Consumption, though, is everything. Right now, in your hand or on your desk in front of you, you have an open pipe connected to the world at large, blasting more information than you can possibly handle. It works in the other direction too, but most of what you're feeding back into pipe is fodder for large corporations to influence what comes down the pipe in an effort to sell you shit. Everything you get gets a little less original or interesting, and most of what you give is abused. This is the way of the Main Stream (ha).

There are opportunities, though, for underground activity - particularly if you're open to using outmoded, but still active means of communication. The Underground, these days usually associated with obscurity at best, aborrhence and criminality at worse, could include an attempt to carve out a common space for people express themselves offline, free to them, for whatever reason they want.

**Talk is Cheap, Privacy Isn't(?), Meatspace is Neat**
As a function of advances in technology and changes in society that accompany that, these days talk is indeed cheap. Nearly all phone service providers (in my country, at least) offer unlimited domestic outgoing and incoming calls for next to nothing. Even toll-free numbers, once *very* expensive to get, can be found bundled with all sort of VOIP, call forwarding and other features for around $100 a year if you aren't looking hard, far less (with fewer features, and possibly a per minute rate) if you are. You can set up a full PBX system, allowing for multiple extensions and voicemail boxes, call menus, etc. over a weekend with a Raspberry Pi and parts from Ali Baba. Phone line communication stuff, all things considered, is *cheap as fuck*. Most people won't bother with playing with this stuff because it isn't *free*, and for most intents and purposes isn't *necessary*, but a would-be hobbiest could get something set up without a huge investment. It probably costs less than, say, maintaining a medium-sized Lemmy instance.

One of the neat things about payphones is, unlike your cellphone, the only (relevant, don't @ me former phreaks) information leaving it is basically the number, it's location, and whatever audio you're feeding into the receiver. That's it - it's not compiling information on your habits, it's not taking information from all your devices to build a profile of you, it's not following you from place to place - it's just getting your signal to a single end point. It's a one-off transaction - pick up the receiver, send and receive noise, put down the receiver. Depending on who is at the end point, there's nothing stopping you from shoving whatever noise down the pipe you want.

Particularly if the people at the end invite it - maybe by leaving their number in the booth, and a message suggesting they don't expect anything in particular.

**Please leave a message after the tone**

Suppose card guy from the beginning did go to the payphone down the way after I left. He tries the finance line and still doesn't get through. He hangs up, and just stops for a moment to collect himself. No money, no real destination, probably not in the best state of mind.

He's about to shuffle off, but he sees a sticker in the booth with a 1-800 number. *Just* a 1-800 number, and a date from about a week ago. "What the hell, I'm not doing anything and it just started to rain. May as well stay in the booth, and this could kill some time."

What is he hoping for, really  at the end of the line? Suppose it's just an open voicemail box - does he say anything? What does he say? Suppose it's a recorded message like 

*Thank you for calling the U.S. nuclear arsenal command system. To launch nuclear missiles, press one. Para Español, marque uno*

(Thanks TootS and Transient)

Does he press one? What happens if he does? Nothing? An exploding sound? A voicemail prompt for survivors? Hell, maybe a phone rings somewhere and some half-asleep dude answers, asking why card guy saw fit to start WWIII. Who knows?

How would he feel about whatever just happened - weirded out? Bored? Entertained, if only at the absurdity of it v. his current situation? How would he feel if he came back next week, called that number again, and things are different - they're voicemails people left on that number since then. Some bored, stoned teenager playing music from his shitty band off a cellphone. Some wannabe performance art psycho who staged a melodrama for passersby by sobbing loudly into the phone about some fake slight they've suffered. A grandmother about to read off her credit card number interrupted by a male voice that says "Don't ever fucking do this it's so god damned stupid, we didn't even ask for this". Someone legit pouring their heart out about their troubles, just because they found an anonymous void to do so in. Whatever.

Again, what would he think? What would whoever set this number up and slapped the sticker in the booth think?

They'd probably think that on these days, in that phone booth, some people called a number for no rational reason and did some pretty weird shit. Other people don't know about it. The FAANGs that be don't know about it. Only the callers and the guy providing the number know about it.

And that's pretty cool, when you think about it.