UPDATE
No cell phone for quite a few weeks now and I miss it not one bit. Got a nice and heavy old brown phone off ebay and Roby found a little microcassette answering machine at the Salvation Army on Greenmount, and I find I’m paying much more attention to the people I talk to on the phone now, though still working on getting the new number out to all the people who might want to call me one day…
We get a lot of wrong numbers, though. Not just regular wrong numbers— we get at least one call almost every day from somebody who wants us to open the door and let them in. At first I just told them all it was a wrong number and quickly excused myself. But more and more the callers would try to explain: “I’m just out front, can you just open the door for me?” So I’ve been getting more and more patient about explaining my inability to open the door.
I’ve thought a lot about the door they must be standing in front of… where is it? Is any part of it glass? And so there must be an old sign on the door with our number on it, right? I wonder if it’s hand-written… When I walk to my job I pass two different houses that have permanent sharpie-on-unlined-8.5x11 signs taped to the door with instructions for deliveries, and when I think of the sign in front of the building I don’t know how to let anyone into, I think of a yellower version of one of those signs.
The connection is always really noisy when these people call— you can tell right away it’s not anyone we know from the immediate street noise and the extra-distant sound of the caller’s voice. I used to think this was because they were using some kind of intercom that was mounted on the building, near the yellow sign, but then I got to thinking that there’s probably not an intercom that can just dial up a regular phone number.
We got a message on the answering machine yesterday, however, that has completely changed my thinking about the locked door and the building it leads into. The message starts with the same kind of noisy, busy-street sounds. Then a man’s voice says:
“How ya doin?”
There’s a bit of a pause. Then, same voice:
“Are you alright?”
then a second voice, possibly a woman:
“What year is it?”
and the first voice answers:
“86.”
So It would appear that the inaccessible building is not only located somewhere else in the city, it also seems located at a different point in time. It could explain the intercom-like quality: those ancient coin-operated “pay-phones” that used to dot the urban landscape. I will update this site with any further developments. Also, sorry for having a kind of anything-goes Sir-linksalot blahg here. Things are gonna shape up around these parts.