Unplug

The more I think about it the better it sounds. Unplug all my web sites, except this one, and go back to corporate for a while. I could possibly keep the payphone site alive but as the years have worn I have lost my religion when it comes to actively covering the world of public telephony. No one cares what I have to say. The enduring interest in the subject matter revolves around nostalgia and irony. I have no capacity for either.

I could give Flaneur.NYC a jumpstart like no other by redirecting all the thousands of hits a day going to the payphone site over there. That would be hilarious. People looking for mailbox locations and payphone numbers would instead be reading this.

I’ve been doing what I do now for over 15 years. I had one significant freelance web dev job, for a company in Indiana. That lasted a few years, ending the way such gigs always do. I basically got fired, but my apathy toward the job was palpable. If I’d stayed with it I think it could have lasted into the years, but that’s assuming I had the interest. The boss at the company was referring me to other companies, getting me even more work. But it just didn’t matter to me. I think it started to melt down when the NYTimes story was published.

I did a handful of other small web sites, almost all of them gone now. The last site I did for someone other than myself was for a bar near me. Even that site I did with ambivalence.

I could do well in corporate again, as a mid-level product manager. I don’t want nor would I accept any kind of Director level role, such as the last few positions I had at TWX. A structured environment would do me well, I think, if not for a year or so than maybe even for the duration. I remember when I hired people and was poked fun at for my tendency to choose older applicants. In the tech realm 40 is considered old. I think one guy in particular I hired was 50. He since moved on to be the director of a city-run web site. I never made a bad hire, I don’t think. The only loser who worked for me was the one who tried to fake his death after 9/11. But I did not hire him.
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Yesterday Tom had to come over. Around 4:30 he called to ask what I was doing in the bathroom. Well, he didn’t say it quite like that. But he said water was pouring from the ceiling of the apartment downstairs. I was doing absolutely nothing at the time, having showered hours earlier. No water was running. This has happened before. He came up and blamed it on my towel, which was hanging on the curtain rod and drying. For the towel to be responsible for water pouring into the downstairs apartment was impossible. It would have to have been completely soaked for it to be dripping any amount of water. The towel was in its usual spot, drying and all but not pouring water down. That doesn’t even make sense.

Anyway, the upshot of having Tom there for about an hour was that it actually felt nice having somebody present. My life is spent mostly alone, save for the quasi-manufactured encounters with bartenders and barflies. Simply having somebody present, even the potentially volatile angry landlord, made me feel good. There is a certain tightness in my chest that sometimes comes around in the late afternoons. That tightness loosened. Made me wish I had a roommate, or someone around whom I could feel comfortable.

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Strange thing I just spotted. A friend of mine, Paul, is a comedian (isn’t everybody?). Some years ago he and several others were featured in a New York Times story about a place known as the Comedy House. The address, which just happened to be a few doors down from where I live, was where comedians who had moved to New York were welcome to stay for a while, either free or at little cost. Or something like that. It was a puff piece. A nice story and all but not much on depth. The story registered with me mostly because the house in question was basically right next door. I did not know Paul at the time.

A featured photo for the story had a couple dozen comedians on a staircase at the Astoria Boulevard subway stop. That photo, for some reason, is now on display in a window at the C-Town on 34th Avenue and 35th Street. I mean, duh, the reason is obvious enough. It’s one of 8 or 10 images that comprise a tableau of Queens and Astoria-specific images. I doubt the C-Town sought licensing permission from the Times to use that photo, but I thought it curious nonetheless that Paul was (I thought) in that photo and possibly unbeknownst to him now on display for all to see on 34th Avenue.

Alas, he is not actually in that photo. He was in another photo from that Comedy House story, but not this one. I recognize some of the faces, though, so it might interest Paul’s comedy colleagues to know that their moment of Times fame has risen again.

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At the Windmill. I’ve actually been writing this entry for a few days. It is Sunday. Someone wrote last night to ask if it was still possible to call NYC payphones. I responded in the negative, with a possibly too-lengthy essay providing background on the matter. The trend toward blocking incoming calls on payphones started in the early to mid 1990s, and never changed course. I was impressed, though, that this person had dialed dozens of numbers from my web site, finding either that they were disconnected or emitted the screeching noise. He did not seem to know that the noise is an internal modem. Payphone owners connect to that modem using Elcotel software to see how much money the phone made, if it was working properly, etc. I doubt that polling interface gets much use these days. I seem to remember that John was seen using that software in the payphone documentary Ugo and I did. That might actually be as much of that software as I’ve ever seen myself.

I also got in my pearl of knowledge regarding the rotary payphone revival of 1994. That’s one of my favorite anecdotes. Community board members decided they could thwart drug dealing by replacing touch tone phones with old rotary dialers. Even in 1994 those rotary dial pieces were archaic, and not even being manufactured anymore. NYNEX just happened to have a bunch of them in storage somewhere. On account of this rotary dial revival in 1994 there were a number of such phones in service around NYC as late as 2010 or 2011, including the one at Veronica’s in Astoria and in the phone booth at Gibney’s (now Gilbey’s). I think that last one came out in 2009… I wrote about it somewhere when it happened.

Thinking I should take that message I sent to the questioner and spin an article for the site out of it. It’s of some sort of general interest, I would think. I mean, as far as niche interests go it is of general import to those who care. I am not certain anymore if I care.

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I think I will go to Roosevelt Island.

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That was a brilliant way to waste an afternoon. There appear to be no payphones whatsoever on the island, though I’d be willing to bet there is one inside the hospital. I did not get up that way today. There was one out on Main Street. It’s gone. Inside the subway station? Gone. At the exit of the Gristede’s? There used to be two there, then one. Now? None. And there was at least one in that area where the escalators and elevators are. I could see the ghost of a payphone that had been on the wall.

The bridge, which I always forget was repainted some years ago, has a bike lane. No bicyclists used it. They rode on the sidewalk, which is narrow as hell, and is bookended by signs saying not to ride on that surface. It seems like it’s been awhile since I encountered the phenomenon of illiterate bicyclists.

I thought I would take a bus back to AsLIC. What a fine idea. Too bad the Q102 is one of those lines where the drivers just decide not to show up. The Q102 is such a great idea. It stops as close to my front door as any bus around. Too bad its schedule is mostly a fiction.

That FDR Memorial is a strange, ungainly beast. It was not quite as odd to me as it seemed last time I saw it, which I guess was a couple of years ago. I forgot how cool the very end of it is. The island just kind of ends, and you’re not far from the water. I remember hearing that there used to be a fake cemetery at that end of the island. It was used for a movie I think.

The Cornell computer programming school buildings are shaping up to be hideous monstrosities. It’s in progress but the most completed structure is one of the ugliest new buildings I’ve seen in a long time, maybe topping the Boro Hotel for its ability to hurts one’s eyeballs.

It’s 5:38. All I’ve eaten today was a bland slab of pizza from the Gristede’s on RI, and now a can of Arizona Fruit Punch. I’ve heard from many reliable sources that these Arizona brand Iced Teas and Fruit Punches are some of the worst shit you can put in your body. I believe it.

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Last night I encoded some old cassette tapes. They are not mine. They are Alan’s. In the 1960s he surreptitiously recorded conversations with his neighbors in the Bronx. Some of it is quite entertaining. Some of that characters sound like, well, characters. I encoded these tapes years ago, but it was in the obnoxious RealAudio format which was something of a standard at the time. I can’t believe how good those tapes sound. They are from 50 years ago and they sound better than my tapes from the 1980s. I may have played my tapes a lot more than Alan ever played these, which might account for the poorer quality. But his tapes are no-name brand which look, at a glance, like they should sound like shit. Mine were usually Memorex or TDK. Going to go home and encode some more.