I am sitting in the far, far reaches of my apartment, in the bedroom, sitting in The Chair next to the heater and the air conditioner, both contraptions working on me, competing, one generating heat and the other blasting cold air at my face. The apocalypse could rage in the living room and I would not hear it. I am listening to Mahler’s 4th Symphony and typing mostly by the light of this computer screen, with help from a 99-cent clip-on light. I nearly ended that previous sentence with an irrelevant temporal flourish. I lazily came close to mentioning the length of time between now and the date I purchased that clip-on light. But no. I deferred to efficiency of expression, and I clipped from this monologue the irrelevance of how long ago this light entered my life.           I find myself frequently appending sentences with useless mentions of how long ago something happened or did not happen, and to stomp out that frivolous habit I bend back the spoon by eliminating all mention of dates from my litanies. I am not a fan of time to begin with, and I feel a special antipathy toward this tendency to self-referentialize by feebly impregnating remarks with the significance of artificial context — that context being the presumed importance of comments in the greater time horizon, the wider spectrum of experience, an expanse of time which, in fact, does nothing but confirm the vanquishment from history of the 99-cent clip-on light by which (partly, with the light of the computer screen) I type these words.           I woke up this morning and attempted to wash dishes, but instead cut myself in the hand, cut by the blade of a blender, the black muscle of my right hand dug into and bloodied by the Cuisinart that last saw action mixing popover batter. I am not clumsy but when these incidents occur I concern myself not with the pain or the gushing blood but with the stupidity. The dull movements of picking up the blender, unscrewing its base, then feeling the base slip and propel from my hand and then my hand, stupidly, reaching for the base (which contains the blade) and the blade sinking into the tough muscles. After bandaging it I found myself subconsciously avoiding use of my fifth finger while playing piano, and even while typing — a prestidigitational lipogram. Piano playing, while not most people’s idea of athleticism, is a more muscular act than pecking out words at these cheap plastic keys. Piano playing is a re-creative act, though, and in my exertions I find that re-creation is a simpler and less vulnerable movement to make with these hands than creation.           This little injury will fix itself soon enough. I heal quickly, but not since college have I been fully unable to play piano with one of my hands. I would go bananas if I lost the ability to play piano. I feel my inner sanctum lose some of its balance if I sit and play through music written for the left hand alone.           I skipped ahead to Mahler’s 5th Symphony, a work which I find comical and crude at times. Certain moments of purportedly highest drama in this work sound to me like Van Halen.           It is scattershot how memory works. I already forgot why, moments ago, the memory of a confused line cook at a college cafeteria passed through my mind. One Sunday afternoon, with nowhere else to go for food in that tiny, tiny town, I found myself in line behind 3 other people waiting to place orders from a friendly but hapless man assigned to work the grill. Everything confused him, and waiting in that line for 78 minutes felt then like those hours I experienced later in life ^{(another concoction of relevance via temporal assignment)} where rising from bed felt impossible, my body grimly locked in sleep from which I could not wake. The first moments of death must be this way.           Now I am hearing the Herbert Hamilton Harty Piano Concerto.           I had something more to say here. Something. This is a miniature form of exile, here in this corner, here in the confused combat between hot and cold. I had a moment of reaching under the zeitgeist this week. A review of a new publication of Flaubert’s letters described the author’s account of his stolid reaction to the death of a close relative. It woke me up, that brief quotation.

The Exchange Name system fell out of general use long ago, but I wonder if its revival upstate is inspired by the Telephone Exchange Name Project web site, a long-time favorite of mine that I check in on once in a while if only to make sure it still exists. If you do not know what a Telephone Exchange Name is or why I think it is special to see them then give the above-mentioned link a quick read. The TEN Project collects exchange names from old phone books, personal recollection, and other sources, and encourages a common sense revival of Exchange Names today. I referred to the TEN Project today after getting together these photos of telephone exchange names I have seen around NYC. Some years ago I considered making a single project of this and assembling as many of these sightings as possible, but it seemed cliché. Public signage bearing exchange name numbers from generations ago are not common but they endure, often quite visibly at companies very much still in business. This first photo shows the giant Steinway Storage Warehouse in Long Island City, seen by thousands of daily commuters from the Queens-bound side of the Queensboro/59th Street Bridge.

AS8-9090, AStoria 8-9090, Steinway Storage Warehouse

I spotted this fine specimen in Astoria, and marveled not so much at how this company still has its Exchange Name number over its front door but at how it is practically the only forward-facing telephone number they have on their place of business. (They have their modern phone numbers in the lower right of the front window). Millionaire Realty appears to have been in Astoria for a very, very long time, and has the confidence to show it. Looking for a place in Astoria? Dial zero and ask the operator for Astoria 4-5500, or AS4-5500.

AS4-5500, AStoria 4-5500

The MU in True Value Lumber Boys’ old-format phone number stands for Murray Hill. The Lumber boys have their modern phone number posted above their exchange name number, but I noticed that they still don’t have an area code.

MU3-0410, MUrray Hill 3-0410

The next sighting is from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where a locksmith still uses its TRafalgar exchange name to advertise its business phone number of TR9-2740.

TR9-2740, TRafalgar 9-2740

I borrowed the next Exchange Name sighting from my Faded Signs series, which is another photo set I add to once in a while. ALgonquin 4-1817 was the number for a real estate company at 450 Sixth Avenue. If you look closely at some of my other Faded Sign pictures maybe you’ll be able to make out other Exchange Name numbers in the barely-readable text that still survives from decades ago. The modern version of this old phone number — 212-244-1817 — belongs to Guess Handbags, located at 320 5th Avenue.

ALgonquin 4-1817

According to the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce web site: “Billharz Plumbing, Inc. has been family-owned and operated for three generations since 1927 – Henri X. Billharz, Robert H. Billharz and Henri J. Billharz are licensed and certified.”

One of the signs on the Billharz Plumbing building still shows its exchange name number of STillwell 4-2468, but in these modern times the number is (718) 784-2468.

ST4-2468, STillwell 4-2468

The front windows of the Astoria Finast Window Company were the scene of a memorable exchange between the owners of Finast and an anonymous telephone caller who left unkind messages on the store’s answering machine. The message began with “To The Gargage That Spit And Put Stickers On My Window”. The rest of the message can be read here. It is part of my Typos, Engrish, and Other Public Grammar Gaffes section to which I add pictures once in a while.

Today the signage at the Astoria Finast Window shop is notable for its Telephone Exchange Name phone number, though the company seems to have tried to gloss over this relic of its past. I would expect any company to be proud of this tell-tale sign of its longevity. Nevertheless, Like Astoria Finast, many long-time companies sanded over or obliterated their Exchange Name numbers, replacing them with modern phone numbers.

Pick up your rotary dial phone and dial 0, then ask for RAvenswood 1-2089 to talk to someone at Astoria Finast Window Company.

RAvenswood 1-2089

The penultimate sighting in this set is from a company called Metro Systems Corp. Their number is most likely STillwell 6-0640. I say “most likely” because I want so much to believe that there was once a STeinway telephone exchange name in this part of Queens. I doubt there was, as the Telephone Exchange Name Project web site has no mention of it, but I allow myself to imagine what might have been within a field of knowledge known to be incomplete.

ST6-0640, STillwell 6-0640, Metro Systems Corp.

Like my first sighting, this last one shows another highly visible Telephone Exchange Name specimen. This one is located on Astoria Boulevard, at the highly-trafficked crossroads connecting the Grand Central Parkway, Triborough Bridge, and BQE. This number uses the RAvenswood exchange, which happens to be the exchange of my land line phone.

RA8-5660, RAvenswood 8-5660

I do not know what company used to own the RA8-5660 number. Today, however, this phone number so visible to passers-by would translate to 718-728-5660. That number belongs to a place called “Acupuncture & Acupressure”, a small shop located on Broadway in Astoria. I wonder if that company is aware that its phone number is blasted across the side of a nearby building, albeit in Telephone Exchange Number format.

Florida Waterfront

I spent most of my youth in Florida, and lived for a year in a house situated similarly to the homes in this picture. We lived in a house at the end of a canal, our yard just above sea-level. Our grass did not run into the water as does the weedy growth seen in this picture. Our pier was not the obvious safety hazard seen in this picture. Our pier was well-built, its perimeter surrounded by a solid wood fence against which I leaned heavily while fishing or staring into the dark waters of Tampa Bay. Fishing was done in our back yard but in such shallow waters we knew that catfish would be our heartiest catch.

The waters at the end of the canal were a tantalizing void into which I stared. At low tide I saw horseshoe crabs, stingrays, catfish, turtles of widely varying sizes, and other mysterious-to-me sea creatures that seemed lost, having wandered far from the open waters into the dead-end gulley that was a place of random theater. At low tide the creatures would get trapped in the disappeared waters, forced to wait for the tide to return so they could swim again. Sometimes I saw horseshoe crabs flipped over, immobile, their creepy-crawly pedipalps and pusher legs flailing in the hot sun. We had a long stick which we sometimes used to flip these crabs back on their feet, but the gesture often failed to return them to open water.

The water was dangerous. There were no fences along the water’s edge. The boy who lived next door once fell in. I did not know what to do. I ran to the front door of his house, opening the door without knocking or ringing the doorbell, looking for James’ father. I ran into the living saw James’ father, sitting calmly in his easy chair reading a newspaper. I yelled “James fell into the canal!” and the man spontaneously threw the paper aside and leaped from his chair, a reflex action for which he needed no training. He ran out to the yard and pulled James from the water, the boy’s body soaked in the filthy, mangy water of Tampa Bay.

James considered me his hero after this incident. He claimed I saved his life. Had I not run for help he said he would have drowned, or been rabidly stabbed and then feed-frenzied by a haul of swordfish. James lavished me with tokens of appreciation, ceremonially presented to me in the safe space under the trees that separated our yards. One of his gifts was a tennis ball he found floating in the canal. Another gift was a pile of leaves and branches he collected from the trees in his yard.

The fear of falling into the canal was no joke among residents of those houses lining the waterway. I never fell in but after James did I heard the stories of others who stumbled into deeper waters further up the road. These tales, told by men younger than I am now, needed no fanciful exaggerations but were nevertheless embellished with fantasy creatures and impossible scenarios. Alligators were commonly seen in the waters but never the swordfish that some parents claimed would impale our little bodies should we dive in to these waters. Piranha are freshwater creatures from South America but that didn’t stop some chucklehead parents from swearing that a swarm of them patrolled the canal, waiting to leap from the water and munch on the face of any child caught staring.

These tales informed the respectful distance I kept from the canal, but they also fed the panic that arose like encroaching sea filth when the waters rose high and our back yard flooded. Never did the floodwaters reach more than a few feet past the sea wall but this small overflow removed the point of division between the sea and the land, and it fed my nightmares with images of sea creatures wandering onto the land, curiously poking around and picking through the things of a human. The theater stepped from the stage. I mostly feared those horseshoe crabs, which I knew from school to be mobile creatures. I thought of them as giant cockroaches — not out of any disdain but simply because to me they resembled the hard-shelled, oversized cockroaches I saw and sometimes heard hissing on our porch.

The waters covered our yard and I tried to sleep, knowing for sure that my room would fill with horseshoe crabs and turtles and their mucky cast of cronies. I do not know what happened. I do not know what parade of visitors rose from the canal to inspect my sleep but I know my room filled to the ceiling with filthy bay water and swirling schools of stingrays and swordfish.

I stopped scanning slides for a while, but this week I started back at it. I stopped partly because I was tired of it but also because the slide scanner was hocking up crazy stuff, malfunctioning so badly that I just said to hell with it. I did what any reasonable person would do. I stopped using it. I gave it a break. And when I resumed using the thing, it worked fine. I guess it overheated. The scanner is a Pacific Imaging PowerSlide 3650. It is a crazy contraption. I like the PowerSlide 3650 but it is not an easy-going, hands-off device. Getting this thing to do what I expect of it is a team effort. When it works it just churns away, spitting out decent-quality scans of my collection of thousands of slides. When it does not work I could blow a gasket. The scanner jams. It jams a lot, and when it jams it produces an awful hacking noise, the metal arm mechanism pounding at the hapless little 2″x2″ slide, occasionally ingesting said slide and thrusting it into the abyss of the scanner’s innards. These slides are destroyed, and by special dispensation of the company that makes the scanner I was allowed to disassemble the PowerSlide 3650 and pull the remains of some annihilated slides from inside — without voiding the warranty on the device. I had to do this because they were jamming the scanner from within, rendering the device useless. The first slide pictured here was 52 years old before the PowerSlide 3650 made it look like it had been chewed up and spit out by a cud-chewing beast. The second slide is from 1976 and looks like it was held under a blowtorch.

I do not mean to trash the PowerSlide 3650 scanner, though. Having called it out by name and manufacturer I guess I should make it clear that these mangled slides are rare. I have scanned over 10,000 slides with the PowerSlide 3650 and so far I have only lost 3 slides in the manner described. Those slides were in poor condition to begin with and maybe they should not have been committed to the jam-happy PowerSlide 3650. I say “maybe” because I can not understand why the 3650 jams on some slides but not others. Perfect slides are as likely to jam as bent or damaged slides. I decided not to use the PowerSlide 3650 to scan some older glass mounted slides. I never tried it but the possibility of shattering the glass in a scanner jam was enough to make me scan those on the CanoScan 8800f flatbed scanner with the slides attachment. The image quality is not as good but I do not want to risk crushing the slides, which are from the 1940s.

The idiosyncrasies of the PowerSlide 3650 are tolerable for the career hobbyist in me but disappointment lingers. I imagined I could run a side business with it, loading up 100 slides at a time and scanning them at 25¢ a pop while I slept or did other things. I could not, as part of a business endeavor, promise anything to a paying customer with this thing. It is too high-maintenance a device. This is probably a good thing, though. It keeps me from turning into the Robin Williams character in One Hour Photo, a movie I liked but which came up a little short of its intentions. I hate to say it but for me the most enduring image from that film is of Robin Williams sitting on the can, taking a dump in the bathroom of his obsession’s house.

I started scanning slides back in March, and since then I have sought out complete sets of family slides, sets which span decades and capture those milestones and milliseconds endemic to ordinary life. There have been some glorious gems in all those slides. A color shot of Times Square in 1942 looks like no image I have seen of that well-documented crossroad. The place looks so small in 1942. Today Times Square looks like a wannabe Las Vegas that suddenly turned into a trailer park with its $2 lawn chairs and bargain-basement pedestrian accoutrements. Slides from the early 1940s also get my attentions, not just for the color quality but for the fact that America in the 1940s is remembered as a black and white era by those of us who arrived after. Media memories command authority, and if World War II was reported on television and in print in black and white then most of us human beings whose lives did not touch the 1940s will imagine the battlefields and the soldiers themselves as black and white creatures.

The slides have acres of dreck about them. Miles to go between blurry, deteriorated slides of Niagara Falls and a clear, real image of a city street. Lives all start to look the same. Americans go to Cypress Gardens, Key West, Daytona Beach, and Weeki Wachee. They go to The Wisconsin Dells, Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and the Black Hills. Who cares? Why even record these mundane adventures, already repeated and recorded by infinite others. Why document anything? Is it because human memory has for centuries been presumed to be fallible? Unreliable? What keeps drawing me back in to these mountains of engrammatic detritus, these human memory piles?

It must be the pictures. I love the pictures. I click through hundreds of them a day, assaying the memories of the dead as if they are my own.

Update: 10.30.2009: If you own a Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 and have tales to tell from your use of it, check my Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 Message Board, which as of yet contains postings only from myself.

888-950-5553

I knew this was bogus, though I might not have been so immediately sure of its bogosity had the same thing not happened to D several months ago, and also on a Saturday. She received a text message alerting her that her account had been compromised, and to call a toll-free number to restore access. The wording, as I remember it, was virtually identical to the message I got, and she quickly found that it was just another type of spoofing scam.

Other clues about the text message seemed to point to its sketchiness. The random capitalizations of first letters did not seem right, and the way it tried to identify my card number with its first 6 numbers and not the last 4 or 5 numbers seemed uncharacteristic of a legitimate bank communication. Nevertheless I checked my card and of course found that I have no account number or bank card that begins with 511182. I then looked up the toll-free number on some search engines and found nothing of any substance, though I would not consider search engine presence as proof of anything conclusive.

I knew it was fake but I decided to call the number anyway, just to see what it sounded like, and to see how the scam was supposed to unfold. I did not call from my cell phone or land line. I called from a payphone. I did not want Caller ID phishing (if that was a part of the scam) to deliver any personally identifiable information of mine to the fraudsters.

The first time I dialed the number I got a message saying all circuits were busy. I called again and when it rang I was immediately tipped off by something that might be considered pretty subtle: The phone rang once, and then quickly rang a second time. To me this suggested that the call was being forwarded to somewhere else. The guttersnipes must have hijacked a dormant or unused toll-free number and used its voicemail software to forward calls to their Call Center of Iniquity. If this was true then it answered my only real question about this scam, which was how an outlaw operation was allowed to get a toll-free number. I am sure it happens but my guess is that they did not own the 8889505553 number, but likely used common phone phreaking or social engineering techniques to take it over from someone else. I could be wrong about this but it made sense as it passed through my stream of consciousness.

I notice that this alert came on a Saturday, as did the similar alert D received some months ago. Our two incidents do not a valid sample make but if it represents a broader pattern then it might suggest that the voicemail system and toll-free number — if they were in fact being hijacked — were being used while its owners are out of the office or otherwise unawares.

A pathetic sounding robot voice answered and announced that I had reached “Chase 24-hour Card Activation.” To enter my credit card number I should press 1, to hang up press pound, and I think there was another option. To me it sounded crass and phony but I could see where someone in a panic might not listen to the nuances of the automated voice attendant and instead simply head straight to the escape route of re-activating their allegedly dead card. I would also guess that people enter their credit card number without comparing the first six digits of their card to the 6 digits in the text message, either because they don’t have the card with them or because people are more inclined to believe that their bank account information will get stolen then they are inclined to believe that it will not get stolen.

A real bank would not simply send you a text message. They would more likely call you, leave a communication in your online banking, or even mail you a letter. Nevertheless people do choose to get urgent alerts from their financial institutions sent to their cell phones. My identity theft insurance claims I will get a text message if anyone tries to open an account using my personal information. This has not happened — and I doubt it ever will because I have more confidence in the crooks’ ability to bypass these systems than in the banks’ abilities to maintain them — but something in me did perk up in the first instant that I saw this message.

I am sure this scam works.

]]> http://sorabji.com/1/2009/10/888-950-5553.html/feed 4 http://sorabji.com/1/2009/10/1020.html http://sorabji.com/1/2009/10/1020.html#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:50:39 +0000 sorabji http://sorabji.com/1/?p=347
It’s my 19th 10/20. On this day, at 12:00 noon on October 20, 1990, I boarded an Amtrak train and left for New York.

Three years elapsed between my 10/20 (that sounds like a tax form) and landing that job. Next year will be my 20th 10/20. I like the symmetry of 10/20, and next year’s will land on the perfectly beautiful 10/20/10, or 10/20/2010.

Experience Smith at Ye Olde Coffey Grounds

D spotted this litte yard a couple of months ago, and a few weeks later she and I were on a bus to Woodbury Common, she going back with me not for the shopping but to lead me to this interesting little burial ground.

Cemeteries turned into parking lots are not uncommon. There are instances of this even in my immediate surroundings: The parking lot of the grocery store I frequent most often was built atop two large, old cemeteries, and none of the burials were exhumed or relocated. The Coffey Grounds at Woodbury Common are somewhat unusual not just because the yard is intact but because it is actively maintained by the owners of the commercial interests which encroach upon it. Parking spots and traffic directly abut the grounds, the hum of activity creating an uncharacteristic background sound for a cemetery visit. At the Coffey Grounds toppled stones are set straight, the grounds are taken care of, and several of the stones we saw that had fallen apart from vandalism or the elements had been re-assembled, some of them bolted back together.

The Coffey Grounds reminded me of the St. George Churchyard and Cemetery in Astoria, and the perils it seemed to face when the church decided to build an apartment building on the grounds. Some thought that the construction of the building would obliterate this small cemetery, but the church followed through on its promise to leave the yard intact. The only drawback to this seems to have been that the grounds were all but impossible to get to during some phases of the construction, but D and I have been there recently and found that public access is fully restored now that the apartment building is finished.