going to try and do something later that i tried once before, but i gave up on it because recording a skype phone call was so annoying. i happened across an easy way to record those calls, so i’ll give it another go. i spent a few nights a couple of years ago recording the craggy, desolate sound of the toll-free exchange at midnight. no one answers those phones and you are left to poke around some voice jail. and the sound can be something approaching eccentric by today’s standards. and i can get in my little quirk. i make toll free calls from payphones as a favor to the owners of the phones. that’s because the owner of the payphone earns about 50 cents for every toll free call made from a payphone. just a little bit of trivia.
the sound of the toll free is what i’m going to try and document. people don’t call customer service like they used to. and some companies don’t even do it via telephone any more. the phone sex lines are hilarious. why do these fucking things even still exist? i admit, in the early 1990s, i messed around with those things. but my experience was very limited, and i don’t think i ever actually paid the exorbitant per-minute rates for any of them. you would get one or two minutes for free before entering a credit card # was required. i remember talking to a woman who clearly sounded african-american, but who introduced herself as a petite irish girl with 36C breasts. and another time a gentleman explained to me at great length how i had to stay on the line for a good long time, paying $2.99/minute, before being allowed into the Gold Room where hot, bodacious babes awaited me. it was ludicrous back then, as it is even moreso now.
a lot of people have told me i should get work as a phone sex operator. i would say that ship has sailed but i don’t think it ever left port. phone sex has always been overwhelmingly targeted toward heterosexual men. and i would feel kind of icky about it, carrying on like that with lonely strangers.
there was one computer chat line i found, though. it was hot. and cheap. i think it was less than 10 cents a minute. no voices, just text. net sex from all over the world. it got it on really hot with a girl from Belgium. we briefly corresponded via postal mail.
now that i think of it there was a lot of that going on back then. it was more erotic, and more dangerous, i think. but also, quixotically, safer. it wasn’t so easy to figure out who people were. i remember a woman named Cindy on a free Manhattan dialup BBS trying to coax me into netsex. i was already doing it with others at the time but something about Cindy turned me away from doing that with her. i actually liked her, and wanted more to talk intellectually than about cocks and cunts… not that those things cannot be the crux of intellectual discussion. but, you know… the Internet came along and largely stomped out the BBS netsex scene, but Cindy found me a few years later on IRC. that’s when her full real name was revealed to me. it was not Cindy. not quite, that is. i only knew it was her because she had certain code words from our conversations that only we would know. i don’t remember what they were now, but they caught my attention quite loudly at the time. it seemed like i should not have known her real name. just like i should never have known that my therapist was and possibly still is friends with the first woman i ever dated in new york. then again, i never did phone sex with “Cindy”. i think her toughest attempt at seduction was when she said that when her husband was fucking her she closed her eyes and imagined it was me.
to do this toll-free thing seems like i might actually want to delve into the deeper realm of paid talk time with one of those “hot, dripping, bodacious babes waiting to talk HOT sex” but i’d have to get a disposable credit card, or somesuch. and i’d want to do some homework, because it is said that you cannot hide your phone number from the owner of a toll-free number, but i am almost certain this does not extend to VOIP/Skype calls. from what i understand VOIP makes faking caller ID trivial — if it is not already done automatically.
ok, i am at the hippie coffee shop for the first time in months. it’s hot as hell in here. i’ve been cranking out thousands upon thousands of web pages, getting back on board with that pursuit. i don’t really like doing it like i used to, but i guess that’s why they call it work. i find the business to be smarmy now. but the idea of going back to corporate is just … no. please, no.
