There are strange doings inside my landline telephone lately. Strange things that seem only to happen on Sundays.

The phone rings but the ring is not normal. It rings twice quickly, not in the normal sustained single ring as if someone is calling. It rings like an intercom or an inter-office type of alert — but I have no “inter-office” environment. My phone should not ring like this but it does and after a short ring or couple of rings I hear a loud dial tone on the phone’s speaker. Nothing shows up on Caller ID. Nothing — not even “Unidentified Caller” to indicate that a call came in.

As this happened on Sunday I stood by the phone and, underneath the roaring dial tone, I heard voices.
Their voices were faint but behind the dial tone I heard a man placing an order for food. I heard him say “chicken” and then, after thinking about it for a few seconds, he said “broccoli.” Then I heard the voice of a woman who seemed happy to take the man’s order. She sounded happy to hear from him, happy to repeat his order back to him, happy to be sharing this moment of communication on the phone.

They were, I assume, unaware that they were being broadcast into my kitchen.

I was enchanted by the man’s voice. He dug into that word “broccoli” in a way that was hungry and wet. Pausing for a few seconds after declaring his desire for chicken I imagined him pressing his fingers to his chin and nearly smiling. Maybe his mouth watered just thinking about it, thinking about how good that chicken could be with something else, something more, something like … Broccoli!

There is something I find disgusting about the way people talk about food. Food and the acts of consumption serve a single purpose in my life: to keep me alive. Others consider eating a sensuous experience while others reduce it to a bodily function in their manners of shoveling food down their mouths.

The landline phone weirdness disturbed me at first. I was concerned to hear a dial tone on my own phone without me picking the phone up. I imagined someone using the line to make long distance or other types of calls. That assumption is a relic of my phone phreaking pasts and is probably outdated to modern practices, but back in the day an open dial tone like that might — if my foggy memory is even remotely correct — have been called a “Bridge”. Those things were solid gold to phone phreaks.

These “calls” came in a few times on Sunday. They left no caller ID. Listening to other calls I heard more voices but I could not distinguish what they said. The voices huddled underneath that loud dial tone. I heard more voices but after the chicken and broccoli conversation I could not distinguish the words. There also was static on the lines.

I found myself craving more of this. I wanted more random sounds to rise up from that mostly-unused landline telephone in the kitchen. Hearing just those few intelligible words excited me.

The kitchen telephone chirps remind me of a project I dipped into some time ago. Using an Internet phone software I dialed around until I found a handful of payphones in the United States that still accept incoming calls. All at once I dialed the numbers, assembling these random locations into a conference call. I brought together payphones in Wisconsin, Chicago, Wyoming, and Texas. People picked up these ringing phones. The first person to pick up was usually puzzled to hear the sounds of other phones ringing. That has never happened me that I can recall but if I was perked up by that sound of a dial tone on my kitchen phone then I imagine I would be similarly piqued to pick up a phone and hear ringing. It reverses the assumption of one who picks up a phone to call a person or place of their choosing by injecting that transaction into the complementary act of picking up a phone and expecting to talk to an unknown party.

I rang up phones in this manner several times and can not put into words how exciting it sounded. A person in Texas would pick up the phone, say “Hello?”, and then stay on the line until (if we were lucky) someone in Wyoming quickly picked up one of the other phones. There would be confusion and even anger as these people asked “Who is this?” making it clear that ” I just picked up this phone and you were there” and “I didn’t call you!”

As these hastily random introductions are being made there lingers the ringing of the other two phones in Wisconsin and Chicago. The two parties probably are not even aware of that sound as they talk, but then a third person in Chicago picks up a phone, unexpectedly jumping into the fray. The pool of sound, this little crackling chaos sounds to me like opera, lost and confused voices spiraling in the wire and making contact in a way that is senseless but self-contained. Once the introductory dust cleared and the people started talking I found that the fascination was controlled by the physical distances between the parties and the comfort offered by the fact that these phones are not only far apart but in public places.