So I went ahead and ordered a skateboard, choosing one on the recommendation of a college friend, since all the boards looked the same to me. He suggested a longboard, so that’s what I got. I do not intend to do anything more with this than get from point A to point B more expediently than I do now. No tricks, no weaving into traffic, although I will probably at least try that here or there. It should cut the time needed to cross the Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge by more than ½, though I’ll want to be careful on the long ramp entering Manhattan. Might take the board to a cemetery to learn how to get balanced on it, even though I’ve fallen out of love with burial grounds all of a sudden.
I don’t think that simply scooting around on it will be difficult to get used to, but being careful might be. I am a very careful pedestrian but once things start moving faster it might be more difficult to keep up.
So yesterday saw a couple of interesting things. Someone, I don’t know who, asked the kiosk people if there was ever a resolution about how the jingle stuff happened. It’s been about a month since the stories were posted so this shows that people out there are still thinking about it, that it is still in the discussion among certain ilks. I know of course that people are still hearing it, so maybe that’s keeping the topic alive in some way. I have seen people making video of the noise-making kiosks things but if they are being uploaded anywhere it’s been lost on me. Maybe people just like to have their own collections for whatever reason, and feel no need to drag the story on ever more since it’s been written about multiple times already. I do want to come forward at some point, but only anonymously. If that can’t be arranged then forget it. I should come forward, in case someone else claiming to be me does that.
One dude damn near caught me in the video he was recording. He would not have known my appearance amounted to a cameo, I don’t think, unless he somehow spotted me a few minutes earlier, punching numbers into the kiosk.
But in the last few weeks I can think of at least 3 instances where I spotted people who, by any reasonable interpretation of their appearance, seemed to be making video of the noises coming out of the kiosks.
Something else from yesterday that seemed interesting at first, but was not, was how I suddenly saw about 1,000 pageviews from the CBS piece that aired over a year ago. I thought maybe they aired it again, or that they syndicated it to radio. It is not a timely piece so airing it again would not surprise me. But they did not air it again. Someone linked to it from Reddit, drawing over a thousand comments I have no intention of reading.
So that was a big nothing. It’s the kind of traffic everyone thinks they want but no one really does, since everyone just clicks to it, blinks for a few seconds, then goes back to Reddit. Same thing happened at AOL/Time-Warner, where all the Time Inc. titles thought the golden goose was to get a firehose of traffic from the AOL Welcome Screen. Yes, you got bazillions of eyeballs that way, but an extremely tiny percentage of that mob scene stayed around for anything, and that’s if your web server and whatever interactive applications you built can even handle that kind of usage. I tried to convince management that quality traffic was more important than quantity, but I never got anywhere with that. I mean, I don’t think the two distinctions are mutually exclusive to a point where you cannot have both quantity and quality. But the quality traffic is the more valuable, or at least I used to think it was. Look where that kind of thinking got me.
I took another couple of panic pills today, for the second time in a couple of weeks. That’s way earlier than I usually go back to those pills but I kind of saw it coming. Now I feel fine but earlier I was on fire somewhere inside, walking it off and lighting up some kiosks to pass the time. A retaliation from the kiosk makers has been to interrupt phone calls after 15 or 16 minutes with a prompt on the screen asking if you wish to continue. I’d heard that pressing “Resume” had no effect, and that the call disconnected anyway, but today I was able to continue a call by hitting that button. I did not wait around to see how much longer it was before such a prompt appeared again. But this kind of approach has no impact on what we are doing with the street theater. The ephemeral nature of the project had always dictated that calls would be short, because people are not stupid. Whether someone knows there is a phone call going on or not their instincts are to find a kill switch, or to just press buttons until something kills the phone call. The red button is an obvious target, although a surprising number of devices have the green and the red buttons reversed in their placement, so hitting the green button is what would hang up the call when it should be the red button.
The closest I’ve come to be busted for anything had, fortunately, nothing to do with the jingle. I do not blast the jingle if the kiosk is situated near someone who is sitting there and who looks like they are going to be sitting there for a while. In one instance I was messing with a kiosk next to a food truck in a location where there really was not much else around for anyone to pay attention to. As I dialed up a number I found that an employee at the food truck was standing directly behind me, watching everything I did. I was dialing a different number from the jingle, one which would have recorded street sounds from the area as best it could through the kiosk’s garbage quality phone calling app. I minimized the phone app and darkened the screen and moved on. The next time I went by there someone from that food truck said to me “You broke the machine.” He said it over and over, and at first i didn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t break anything. Later I remembered how I had dimmed the screen to where it was dark enough that he must have thought I had turned the kiosk off or somehow made it useless.
So if nothing else it validates the wisdom of not blasting the jingle around someone who might recognize me from doing it time after time. For having not done the jingle he only knows me as the guy who “broke the machine”, which doesn’t mean anything because it is not true. Had I done the jingle he would have known me for that and maybe even blown my cover, since who knows if he had heard about this from online or wherever…
I don’t really care about being outed. I would gain nothing for it. It would be like this random blast of traffic from the CBS piece yesterday.I mean a million people would look at me for a couple of seconds, then click on to the next curio, and for any time and effort I put into it I would gain absolutely nothing.
