Hands too tired to type much. Spent a day on Long Island Sound, staying out far later than I anticipated. So I didn’t get anything done on the payphone outline, this after a day that felt kind of like a breakthrough. Suddenly the guts of the research became obvious to me, and through the magic of newspapers.com I culled together a whole lot of perspective on the matter. I only worry that newspapers.com will either go out of business or “upgrade” their product in a way that blows up all my saved research. I just spent about 4 hours on it, getting to a point where I didn’t realize it but I am repeating myself in some places. I have to confront the issue of the person I will refer to simply as The Big MO. He inhabits the worlds of payphones, domain names, drop-ship web sites, and other  means of passive income that seem to make him an envy of the Internet, as well as its villain of questionable morals. My only questions is that if he made $50,000,000 selling something related to his payphone empire then why does he even need to keep coming up with new ideas? And why did he make such a blunt and even rude point of saying no to my inquiries?

…

it is the next day. nothing much on new writing yet but a callback from the FCC gave some fresh inspiration. after an email response I called an FCC number, where someone referred me to the FCC Reference Desk. An uninspiring recorded message saying that no one was there had me thinking twice about bothering to leave a voicemail. I hung up without doing so, then figured what the hell, I’ll leave a message. An hour or so later I got a nice call from Tim, who said that the “docket guru” was out for the day but that he would call back tomorrow after consulting with her. We both laughed at the “docket guru” nickname. He asked what the docket I was looking for referenced. I told him it was about deregulation of the payphone business, and he actually seemed to concur that it was a ruling of some significance. So that was inspiring. I told him I was researching a book about payphones and he seemed reasonably on board with the topic. He made it sound like the missing docket is in storage somewhere in Maryland and that accessing it was by appointment only, but that was before I told him what the docket referenced. He seemed more interested in potentially getting me a photocopy of the document after learning some details about my little project. I would think you cannot write a history of payphones in the U.S. without actually reading that document, which is about as seminal to the subject as the invention of the payphone itself. The fact that it ha snot been made available on the web site suggests no one else has ever requested it. Imagine that…

I know what my problem has been with this project. As usual, it comes back to me being decidedly 50/50 on the subject matter. It’s always been a problem for me that many people associate payphones with phreaks and scriptkiddies, the likes of which I have made pains to distance myself from. Now as I dig into the character of the people who entered in to the business in the 1980s I find that it as even smarmier a scene than I thought. Lots of people piled on to the opportunity, most failed, and those that survived did so via “creative” methods of creating more opportunity where none had been before.

The trade journal was humorous to me at first but on closer reading it reads like a bunch of hacks mining for new ways to nickel and dime the public, and the not-so-public. By that I refer to the prison payphone market, which has been nothing short of an extortion racket since its inception.

The ads in the trade journal are so cynical. “LOCK IN REVENUE” or something. One company’s ad said that they were “GOING TO JAIL”. I’m also fleshing out my foggy memories of people who boycotted COCOTs. It is not unlike the way people (like me) refuse to use gypsy ATM machines. Those things were allegedly mob connected and equipped with skimming devices that recorded debit card numbers — among other troublesome things. I don’t know if that type of problem persists but those machines are simply not to be trusted, just like the COCOTs of yore. And of course they charge obnoxious fees. None should be surprised by the parallels. The independent ATM business of today is run largely by evacuees of the payphone business, who also moved on to laundromats, tchotchke and charms machines, and anything coin-fed.

BTW, I’m hardly implying that bank-owned and bank-located ATMs are immune from skimming and other problems, but the convenience store and gas station ATMs seem far more ripe for such problems.

So if my attitude about actually finishing this project vacillates between enthusiasm and apathy it’s because I did not enter in to this thinking I was going to immortalize a bunch of hacks. By “immortalizing” I don’t mean to suggest that my little project will rise to any importance, but I did go into it thinking that the small companies that used to run payphones would probably not make it in to most histories of the telephone in America, and that seemed like a shame. Now I start to see why these individuals and entities are only described in generalities.

…

At the ghetto coffee shop. Achingly beautiful woman just walked past. Going to wait for her to walk past again. Hah…