a few weeks ago my plaintive plea to the computer when it stalled, stopped, or otherwise didn’t do what i expected of it, was to yell “Come on!” the words reminded me of an SNL skit, where someone impersonated Ted Koppel, and his use of “COME ON!” whence remanding an interviewee was high-larry-oos.
this week i seem ot have replaced “Come on!” with “Work!” sometimes trailed by “Work! You cocksucking piece of shit, just fucking work!” Sometimes the pleas are further adorned with cries of “You worked yesterday,” and “You just worked 2 minutes ago,” and “whycan’tyoujustfuckingwork???”
This verbiage, subconsciously or not, seems to rise from a satire piece i saw on The Onion a couple of years ago. Satire, as is often the case, proved to be more prescient than attempts at capturing reality through focus groups or corporate data collections.
The Onion’s satire tech-tv piece was called something like “Sony Releases Goddamn Piece of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work,” and it went into words about the futility of paying customers’ confrontations with new software and hardware products that are impenetrably baffling to use and senselessly over-featured and under-documented.
The line I remember best, though, is from what is set up as a man-on-the-street interview with someone describing his encounter with the featured product, and he described reaching the point where all he could says was “Work. Work. Just work, you cocksucking piece of shit, just work.”
I find myself saying this every day now.
…..
In other fascinating developments, i attempted to walk from AsLIC to midtown today, but had to turn back when the cuts around my ankles (caused by a pair of unbroken-in shoes in which i walked around in the 104-degree heat a few days ago) seemed ominously painful enough that i did not want to risk breaking down on the bridge with no one to turn to except planet-saving bicyclists whizzing past at 50mph. there are new emergency call boxes up on that bridge, which is comfort, but calling for an ambulance could result in financial ruin.
if that seems melodramatic or absurdly fearful then i only remember the time i broke down on a sidewalk covered with shattered glass, wearing a pair of new MBTs that had not been fully broken in, and which seemed to chomp on my ankles with every step i took. it was a genuinely painful thing, you know, and it felt like i was stranded in the fucking desert for as may options as i had. the sidewlak was in a back-alley kind of road in an industrial area on a Sunday afternoon. no one was around, though during the week i might have expected to see plenty of activity.
my ankles bleeding and my legs ripping with pain any time i took a step i could only take the shoes off, but walking barefoot on a sidewalk covered with broken glass was not a sane option.
(i hate it when i tell people stories like this and they interrupt with “why didn’t you have a second pair of shoes?” or “you didn’t bring gauze strips or bandages?” um, no, i didn’t plan for an emergency of isolation whilst wandering the most populous city in the world. there are certain planning precautions i have come accustomed to incorporating into my wanderings, but at the risk of travelling too heavily i forgo most attempts at carrying first aid around, though i do sometimes carry large amounts of bandages.)
it was amazing to feel so trapped in a town like this, so isolated and left-to-trash.
…..
it is the next day. i got sidetracked whilst pursuing this electric essay last night.
i was disappointed today to find that a childhood memory was all wrong, or that my memory of that memory was all wrong. i was chasing a childhood memory, but as with so many things, there was no real trace of it on the public Internet. i was reminded of the dearth of human knowledge that has yet made it to the Internet when I last visited the Research Library at the New York Public Library. So many volumes and volumes of stuff in those shelves are not to be found anywhere on the Intertubes, and with no profit motive to drive anyone but wealthy philanthropists to the task of making public domain content available (huge swaths of which are but intellectual backwash) it is not hard to imagine a future in which libraries and print collection remain tantalizing resources of unknown value.
not to introduce my little story with such grandeur, though. no, the hcildhood memory i pursued involved (what else) payphones, and specifically an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records which i *thought* said that the busiest telephone in the world was a single phone at Grand Central Station in New York. if i remember right i was even quoted in the New York Times, citing this Guinness Book Record as evidence, my citation of the record (and the childhood memory thereof) used by the Times as evidence to prove that i really did have a genuine, lifelong fascination with payphones and public telephony.
i decided to track this record down. i don’t know if anything in particular motivated me, though the carnage of routed out and dismantled payphones in this town is starting to feel like a disenfranchisement-in-progress.
copies of 1970s-era Guinness Books are not to be found at local libraries, so Ebay was the easiest route, whence I found a 1980s-era copy of a Guinness Book for $1.11. The book arrived today, and I swiftly paged through it, looking for the payphone record.
Alas, either I am wrong about this childhood memory, or there is more research to be done. According to the book received today the busiest phone in the world was a payphone at a Greyhound Bus Station in Chicago, not at Grand Central Station in New York.
Now, I can imagine getting this wrong as a youngster, convoluting the first two letters of the GReyhound station with the first two letters of GRand Central Station. As in idle youth in the remote town of Florida I can imagine a 6th or 7th grade kid either not knowing or at least confusing the difference between Grand Central in New York and a Greyhound bus station in Chicago.
But I htink that there is room for more investigation, more research. Because now that I think of it, I think that the record might have been usurped, the dubious distinction of the world’s busiest telephone passing from Grand Central to Greyhound.
so i shall seek out earlier editions of the Guinness Book for to verify *that* childhood memory, not the first memory that Grand Central had the world’s busiest phone, but that the record may have changed hands between Grand Central and Greyhound. i imagine that the payphone record book was once a competitive space. these days i think the next “world record” for payphones will be “Last payphone standing”, either in the world or in one of the United States, or in a country.
