A long time ago, from a payphone not so far away, I did a radio interview completely forgotten to me until last week. A round of Spring cleaning turned up copies of a CD on which the interview was copied and mailed to me by Alan Dein, of the BBC. Mr. Dein was presenter for “Don’t Hang Up”, a 3-part series which aired in December, 2006; and January, 2007. Click to listen, and read my comments below.

I remember now why I never listened to this – or never listened very far. The interview was conducted one afternoon (over a period of what seemed several thousand hours) from a payphone on Broadway in Astoria, Queens. I had to stand up the whole time. This was not an old-fashioned phone booth with a closing door and a bench on which to sit, and the phone’s cord was not long enough that I could sit down on the sidewalk and talk. I realized later that just such a phone was located nearby, and I would have used that one instead if I’d known how long I would be standing on this spot.

During the interview I described the atmosphere of this stretch of road in Astoria, as well as a snapshot description of its history and ethnic diversity. None of that was included, which would be fine except that instead of introducing me as being in Queens it was announced that I was speaking from a phone booth in downtown Brooklyn. At the time I figured if they got that not-so-little detail wrong then it did not bode well for the rest of the segment, so I hit the stop button and put it away.

That was 9 years ago. I don’t know if I’ve just mellowed since then in my peevish attention to detail, or if I can accept that the creators of “Don’t Hang Up” intentionally changed Astoria to Brooklyn thinking the latter would better resonate with their BBC audience of 2007, which likelier recognized the name of Brooklyn more than that of Astoria, Queens.

As this interview reminds me I was, at the time, doing a crazy experiment in which I used Skype to call 6 or 8 payphones in the U.S. all at once. As the phones were answered I connected the lines into a conference call, creating a random connection of strangers unlike anything I’d ever heard. A man at a bar in Milwaukee unexpectedly found himself talking to a woman at a grocery store in Phoenix. Both parties commenced the conversation asking who the hell each other was and why they were calling a payphone. They both explained, of course, that they had not called anybody. Then a third person entered the call, followed by a fourth and then a fifth individual, each soul confused and irritated but quickly calmed by the flow of ongoing conversation that had moved from bewildered and cranky to interested and engaged. I remember everyone asking a lot of questions: Who are you? Where are you? You’re at a bar? I’m at a supermarket.

It was so interesting to hear, and woefully impossible to describe in its ephemeral weirdness. I should have recorded it but I had such low expectations for the experiment that I did not set up anything that would have allowed that. I also avoided recording the proceedings because I was unsure if that constituted illegal wiretapping.

Alan Dein’s “Don’t Hang Up” series is the end result of countless hours spent in a recording studio calling public pay telephones around the world and waiting for someone to answer, hoping against great odds that whoever picked up the phone would be willing and able to stay around for a while and talk. People who answered talked about themselves, their lives, their immediate surroundings, and other matters. The conversations ranged from winsome to depressing.

Listening to these calls reminded of a sociological phenomenon once described to me as “the case of the familiar stranger.” When I travelled more I encountered “the familiar stranger” once in a while. This was a person I would never see again, who would never know my name nor I theirs. On account of that lack of identifying connection the other party (and/or myself, for that matter) felt free to dump our emotional garbage on each other, unloading our true feelings and anxieties regarding relatives, God, Richard Nixon (hah), and any subject where expressing a strong opinion one way or another to friends or family might result in lasting negative repercussions.

The people who answered the payphones in Alan Dein’s calls in “Don’t Hang Up” do not seem to have used their opportunity to express anything controversial (they were told they might be on the BBC, after all) but some shared sadness and experiences you might not expect to hear so easily from strangers passing you by through a telephone. Many calls sound like job interviews.

It’s too bad that a complete collection of this this series in one place seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Presenter Alan Dein, the show’s producer Mark Burman, and researcher Anne Smith committed untold numbers of hours into creating what amounted to a relatively brief quantity of programming. Today the BBC’s archive page for “Don’t Hang up” looks like the Internet equivalent of a ghost town, with server-side-include errors sticking out like rotted fences and a “last updated” timestamp (December, 2006) that precedes the page’s actual last update by 4 years: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/donthangup/pip/archive/