The only payphone in Flushing with dial tone, at the Main Street 7 train station is, I discovered a couple of days ago, actually unable to make coin-paid calls. I had previously reported that it was the only working payphone in Flushing, but that was based on my incomplete testing regimen. I only check to see if *10 leads to a daily prayer or else I dial 311. I do not, these days at least, make a lot of coin-paid calls.

I was going to make a short video of this discovery but decided to let someone else do it. This man kind of butted in on my activity and, looking up a phone number on his flip phone, attempted to make a call. There is a lot of noise in this video but you should be able to hear the tinkling sounds of the man’s quarters going straight from the coin slot into the coin return chamber.

I brought this to the attention of PTS, the nation’s largest payphone service provider, who informed me that a payphone tech person from the company will be out to fix this soon.

The man’s possession of a flip phone seemed curious at first, raising the question of why he chose to make a call from a payphone when he had a mobile in hand.

My guess is that the flip phone has no cellular service and serves simply as his Rolodex.

Whatever the case it proves, yet again, that people still need payphones, and would use them if they worked. New York is fast becoming a city where people like this are unable to do something so fundamental that most of us take for granted. He was unable to make a phone call.

I DON’T MAKE MANY PAYPHONE CALLS THESE DAYS

As for my documentation of New York’s last working payphones I expect to stick to my usual regimen of dialing 311 or toll-free numbers. PTS phones cost 50¢, most others in NYC are 25¢ per call. That might not sound like much coin in the interest of research and documentation, but nobody pays me to do this, and since ceasing production of new calls for Payphone Radio I don’t have any legitimate reason to place coin calls.

I also, for whatever reason, just don’t seem to have the abundance of quarters I once did. Something to do with the coin shortage, perhaps, or my unconscious move to cashlessness.

WHY DID I WANT TO MAKE A PAYPHONE CALL?

In this case I genuinely did want to make a call, purely for my own satisfaction. I wanted to hear audio from my Payphone Radio come out of the payphone handset after a friend helped me out in connecting audio from the Shoutcast stream to a phone number of legend: 212-255-2748. That was the original and primary number of the old Apology Line, a telephone confessional art project I worked on in 1993 and 1994.

I had planned to do this from the get-go by setting up the Asterisk PBX, as I did a couple of years ago, then connecting a DID to the Shoutcast stream. I have not had time to install or manage Asterisk these days but I might be inspired to do that now, even if the whole setup and maintenance of a PBX seems like overkill when my only goal is to stream one single Shoutcast stream into regular telephones.

In the meantime I was very appreciative of a phreaker who quickly set up a DID and connected it to the Shoucast stream. Until I set up my own Asterisk again I’m forwarding 212-255-2748 to that DID.

WHITHER 212-255-2748?

I acquired 212-255-2748 about a year ago after practically begging Verizon to let me have it. My intent was not to resurrect Apology but to revive the old number with a project in a similar spirit of telephone art. If I get my Asterisk chops up to any kind of speed I might develop the number into more than what it is now.

The matter of connecting Payphone Radio to the number took on a bit of urgency when a new Apology Podcast was launched a couple of weeks ago. I had nothing to do with the podcast but, as expected, calls to the old 212-255-2748 started coming in from listeners who found the old number on the podcast’s website. So far I’ve received over 100 calls.

When the Apology podcast went live I, unprepared for the influx of calls and being lazy with regard to setting it up as intended, simply had the number going to voicemail. Maybe a dozen calls came from people who said nothing, all of them hanging up after a few seconds. It was enough to make me finally stop being lazy and find a way send the number to outgoing audio only so no one can leave messages.

Since acquiring the number in December, 2019; and prior to the podcast, I had fielded a handful of calls from people who found the number somewhere out there, including a series of disgusting calls from a convicted child molester.

The child molester calls prompted to me to question what someone’s decision making process is in calling a number like this knowing, I assume, that Apology ended over 25 years earlier.

While the number was going to voicemail I left no indication that 212-255-2748 was or was not connected to Apology in any way, making it seem selfish and tactless as hell for someone to unload their darkest secrets into a voicemail box that could be going to anybody.

Fortunately for my conscience the above-mentioned sex predator was registered and his deeds fully covered in the media, leaving me with no feeling of responsibility to report him.

In the context of the Apology Podcast I can better understand and appreciate listeners’ temptation to call the number just to see if there is still a connection to Apology. There is a connection, in spirit at least. Perhaps it would behoove me to make that a little clearer in the form of an interstitial or opening announcement. I’ll look into that if/when I get Asterisk up and running.