It might seem gratuitous but I actually connect with the news about pipe bombs being sent to politicians and celebrities. The reason is that Hillary Clinton’s foundation gets all its mail through the same post office where my 181 is located, and because the anthrax mailing to Tom Brokaw was handled through that facility. When I hear that bombs are being sent to the Clintons it does raise the specter of something detonating at the 181, but the minuscule possibility that I would somehow be directly impacted in any way is not really my concern or why I connect with such reports. It’s that I’ve been at that post office for so many years and I’ve become friendly with some of the workers there. This would seem unlikely to most, since some of those people are incredibly surly and downright mean to the customers. But they like me, I guess because I’m not the kind of asshole they seem to expect. One time Mrs. Jones (not her real name) was screaming at a customer about something I don’t remember. As I approached she pointed at me and asked the customer “Why can’t you be like Mr. Thomas? He never gives us any shit like you do.” I was somewhere between appreciating the sentiment and not wanting anything to do with the discussion.
It was at that post office, and in fact almost on the exact spot where the above incident occurred, where I got word that my mother had died. As my sister put it: “She’s gone.” The news was not surprising but it was a moment to remember. There have been numerous other memorable encounters and experiences in that space, too many to detail and too mundane to anyone but myself. As I should have expected there was a bit of a charged atmosphere at the post office when I went last week, a day or two after the first bombs had been discovered. I heard someone say something to the effect that all mail to NBC was being quarantined, or something like that. I had a package delivered, and when I took the “Sorry we missed you” slip to the door I was greeted by one of the same people I’ve seen there for many years. This time, for whatever reason, my package was sitting right there by the door. I don’t remember that ever happening, and I don’t understand why it would, since the package had been there a few days but not long enough that they would have returned it to sender. Usually when I hand them the missed delivery slip they go to the back, where I can’t see them, and they come back a minute later. This time my little package was on their front desk, essentially, and the worker there went through several steps of verification to ensure I was the legitimate recipient of this thing, unlike every other time when he just handed it over.
I don’t really need the 181 anymore, but I hold on to it anyway, despite how expensive it’s become. I think it was originally $24 a year, now it’s over $100. Years ago they promised an array of extra services, such as locker delivery for packages too big to fit in the 181, and the ability to use the physical street address of Rockefeller Center as a mailing address. Neither of these services have been put into action, as far as I can tell. I asked one of the workers a few months ago if the lockers were ever going to be put into use, since the lockers themselves were actually installed years ago. She conceded that it would be handy, wouldn’t it, for me to be able to get packages like that without having to bother her. She said she would “try” to remember next time I got a package to put it in one of the lockers and leave the key in my 181. I guess she didn’t try hard enough, since this never happened.
They also introduced “Informed Delivery”, where images of mail pieces sent to my 181 would be e-mailed to me. Every once in a while I get such an e-mail, usually containing images of junk mail, but for the most part Informed Delivery never works. I went to the 181 last week and found 7 or 8 mail pieces of which Informed Delivery had not e-mailed me images. The service has essentially never worked, and I’ve even received images of mail intended for other individuals at other post office boxes there. Those mail pieces, to the credit of the workers there, never reached me. But being e-mailed images of other people’s mail was a little disconcerting.
Yes, this is a boring ramble about the 181, but my head is boring and so is my life. I’ve been putting long hours into one of my radio projects, which I can’t decide what to name. At present I call it “Payphone Radio” but I might go with “Radio Payphone” instead, since it puts the more important word first. The recordings were made almost entirely from payphones. I have called in to any of three voicemail boxes and delivered monologues that are sometimes sodden, other times depressing, but here or there I get something right. I use magicJack, Google Voice, and Skype. Each has its merits and its flaws, but having multiple options for where to call has been useful for me, since none of them is perfect. Skype used to allow voicemail messages up to 10 minutes, but now incoming messages get cut off at random and Microsoft has indicated they do not know why this is and that they are unable to do anything about it. So I bought a Skype call recorder and at present use it primarily, but Skype is now insisting I upgrade and I’m expecting that some of the fundamental features of a telephone will be removed in the newer version. I had upgraded Skype when I got this new computer and found that it was no longer possible to dial any numbers after a call connected. The baffling removal of this fundamental feature makes it impossible to use Skype to dial in to conference calls or to dial someone’s extension if you reach an automated voicemail system. I uninstalled that “upgraded” version and found a copy of the previous version, which actually allows one to dial extensions and such after a call connects. But I expect that whenever I am forced to upgrade Skype once and for all this and other fundamental features will be lost. That’s how technological progress works. I also am hesitant to upgrade because the new Skype claims to include call recording, a feature I presently deploy via a third-party add-on. Something tells me the built in recording feature will either not work or be inferior, and that it will disable or cripple my current setup.
magicJack allows for 10-minute voicemails but has proven to be a little fussy about continuing to record when there is a long silence, and the naming convention of the sound files is something that creates a lot of extra work for me, at least in this particular project. magicJack also has curious vagaries, though it’s hard to say if the problem is with them or with the payphone network. Any pursuit that relies on a functioning and reliable public telephone network is in peril from the outset, but I fail to understand how I can call magicJack, hear the outgoing prompt telling me to leave a message, leave a message, and then find that the message never arrived. This happened multiple times over the last several months, and is why I largely gave up on magicJack for this project. I’m also unclear why my account there even works, since it has been years since I was last billed for it.
Google Voice only allows for 3-minute voicemails, and I use it rarely because of that, although brevity in call duration is certainly a hallmark trait of payphone calls. I’ve become enamored with the intrusions of automated voices telling me to “Please deposit 25¢ for the next three minutes.” Sometimes that voice is audible in the audio, sometimes not, but its presence has become a sound motif of sorts in these calls. I never thought about how much money I might have spent on this over the years but I can’t imagine it’s all that much. I remember Allan Bridge saying that on average he probably spent about $100 on his Apology Line, this cost going to the three phone lines, cassette tapes, and I don’t know whatever else. I might have spent $100 a year on this, with calls ranging in cost from 25¢ per three minutes to $1 for out-of-state calls like the one I made from Newark last week. The phones at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station cost 50¢ for 15-minute local calls.
Another reason I eschewed Google Voice was because of its bizarre filenaming conventions. Downloaded audio files were named something like QWRGFBYBGSRDNHGVLX.mp3, but this changed at some point while I was looking. Individual files now are named in such a way that, through the magic of regular expressions, I can sanely rename.
Someone, for some reason, actually registered the “payphoneradio.com” domain name, but has thus far done nothing with it. I would ask that person what they had in mind when registering that domain but I can’t figure out who owns it. “radiopayphone.com” is available but I don’t know if domain names really matter anymore.
I’ve been piecing together a chronological playlist for this radio project, a task I’d been putting off because of the tedium of things. In particular the magicJack voicemails use a meaningless naming convention in the form of msg0001.wav, msg0002.wav, etc. This results in numerous duplicate filenames and other annoyances. So I have about 150 of these to sort through, listen to, edit, and then rename using a date and timestamp format. This is how the chronological sorting will be so stupid it can’t not work, assuming I make zero mistakes. It’s good, calming work, though.
Here or there I made some calls from my cell phone. It’s depressing to hear how poor call quality is over cell phone calls compared to landline payphones. Calls from the phones at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station in particular sound positively beautiful, and in some cases I did not even need to apply any kind of filters or amplification. But calls from other payphones, especially outdoor devices exposed to the elements, can sound like total garbage. A lot of payphones in New York now are VOIP, and solar-powered, something I bet few people outside the business know. A quantity of LinkNYC kiosks are supposed to have been implemented with solar panels by now but I don’t think any have been. I don’t know if there is a way to tell if a public telephone is landline or VOIP without getting into its innards, although call quality itself could be a clue, as could other of VOIP’s chirpy aural artifacts. I thought that dialing 700-555-4141 would give some kind of clue, since that number is accessible only through landline phones, and not VOIP. But my delving into that matter has so far remained inconclusive.
Wow, that’s a lot of text for my first posting here in a while. I forgot I could still do this. I have a lot to say about my kiosk project but I need to return to the sound of my own voice.
