5:31:40 PM
the other day I received an anonymous phone call from someone who had apparently been reading this story about how I lost a collection of what I hoped would one day be a list of all the phone numbers of public pay telephones in Manhattan. This person called and left a brief message, which I turned into a 210k .wav file. I've also decided to post here whatever other payphone numbers come to me, either through anonymous phone messages or through the form at the bottom of this page. Hopefully I will not lose any of them this way.I used to do this other phone-related project, but for some reason I never got too far with it. I would go somewhere and find a payphone and call my number here at home, and after the machine answered I would leave the pay-phone off the hook and come home. When I got home and played back the answering machine tape there would usually be several minutes of street noises, then someone would grab the phone and say "Hello? Anybody there? This is 74th Street, who's this?" Don't know what happened to those tapes, but I do remember being disappointed with how they turned out and not caring if I ever heard them again, so I probably recorded over them. At my last job they gave me this amazingly secluded office, and I would while away the afternoons by dialing telephone numbers which were close to my own number at home. I would just make up numbers, sometimes going in sequence, and I would listen to the answering machine messages hoping to get a glimpse into people's lives through the character of these little productions they so carefully staged. 
Most of them were very straightforward and unassuming, the product of veteran message-makers, or else they sound like someone who just got home with their new answering machine and was still in that kind of consumer zone where they feel they can speak freely. Several, though, had this tension and rigidness to them that made them sound like meticulously crafted productions, albeit only 3 or 4 seconds long, which had gone through dozens of takes.At that same job I would sometimes stand outside people's offices when I could hear that they were recording their outgoing message or their name, or a group voicemail message. These were usually announcement-like messages that were sent to dozens of people simultaneously. Recording these voicemails became such monotonous chores, because they were never quite perfect, although everyone knew they didn't have to be perfect, but each one could go through a dozen versions before finally being sent out to everyone. And I found it fascinating to listen to people perfecting their messages. You could hear them talking, then without a pause or any kind of warning they would just stop talking and then start their message over again, rapidly pressing buttons and hurrying to restart their recording without delay. Thinking about it now, I can remember how surprising it sometimes has been to know a person for some time and then to call them at home and hear their answering machine message. Very often I find it's like hearing a strange voice of another person, and the messages are like voices from the other side of their lives. It's hard to know what people are thinking when they make these recordings, but hardly anyone sounds very comfortable with it. I think answering messages were the first "home pages." People thought about getting an answering machine in the same way they think about making a home page, for whatever reason assuming that they need some kind of iconic presence to facilitate or buffer their social interactions. When I was dialing all those numbers from my office, I always hoped I'd find something unexpected that was a window into some terrible situation, or a message which was some desperate person's statement, their final announcement to a mean, heartless world before leaving it forever. Or maybe somehow I could stumble upon some person's cry for help, someone leaving a message on a telephone somewhere not knowing if it would ever be heard, and my idle hours at the office could be spent saving someone from a hopeless trap. The funny thing about having spent so much time dialing numbers like that is that I always looked busy and gainfully occupied at those times. No matter who came into my office or how important someone's business was, they would always wait for me to finish my conversation or give some indication that it was OK to speak. If I really was talking to somebody, I might indicate as much by saying into the phone "can you hold on a sec?" this in turn gave the person who had come into my office the feeling that their words were being broadcast to some remote point, and I could always really notice how their tone of voice would change. It usually shifted, where if a person was typically snotty sounding or obnoxious, having a phone off the hook would turn them into typically polite and genial business-people. If the person was usually polite and mild-mannered, then having the phone open like that had this strange way of making them sound very rigid and precise. I don't know why that is, except I've always thought that phones frighten people into thinking that some empty, anonymous force is monitoring their words. When I was calling all those random answering machines, for a while I transcribed the messages people had made. I never did write down the numbers I was calling, though, nor did I even keep the notes which showed which block of numbers I had called. That was another thing that always made me look a lot busier then I ever really was: not only was I madly dialing numbers and clutching the phone to my head like some kind of addict, but I was also busily writing down information. You'd really think that I was talking to somebody very, very important. Now I can't seem to find the file of what I'd transcribed of all those answering machine messages, though I know I posted it once to a BBS somewhere. December 20, 1995 1:26 AM aHA! i FINALLY FOUND IT!
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