I Gave LinkNYC Kiosks Another Chance at Making Phone Calls

I gave in to the dark side yesterday. Having sworn I would never use one of those stupid things for my Payphone Radio project I decided to give the LinkNYC kiosks another try. My decision-making process came out of a pique of melancholy, after I happened to cross paths with an ex-girlfriend’s mother. I think about 4½ years have passed since the relationship ended.

We made chitchat. I asked how my ex was doing. She’s well.

As the polite conversation lingered she blurted out probably the last question I would have expected: “Are you still blasting Mr. Softee out of those machines?” She was referring to LinkNYC and the headline-making shenanigan I pulled off in 2018.

I laughed and said no, and that I moved on from that nonsense the day Gothamist posted its 6th and final story on the matter.

I did not mention in this conversation that I revisited the Softee thing over the summer, but only for the purpose of getting it into a documentary film.

She was afraid I’d get arrested for the Softee thing. I didn’t say it but thought wow, if making phone calls from LinkNYC machines became illegal on account of my prank then I would have succeeded beyond my wildest imaginings.

The topic of LinkNYC lingered in our conversation. Like a lot of people I know she has seen those kiosks but had no idea what they are or why they exist. She only divined recently that you can make phone calls from them, this after she saw someone dial a phone number and then start screaming into a kiosk just a few days earlier.

The fact that she didn’t know you could make phone calls from those kiosks, and her comment about me getting arrested for it, might suggest that she, like a lot of observers, thought my Mr. Softee thing was some kind of brute force hack or intrusion into the LinkNYC network.

Even the documentary film maker for whom I demonstrated the Softee prank (I also showed her how to get to pornography via LinkNYC) thought I had done something more nefarious than I did, which was simply make a phone call. Still, I have to give myself some credit: There is a lot more nuance to it than that, and a good amount of planning and legwork went into making the prank as simple as placing a phone call. But in the end that’s all there was to it. It represents a sonic version of the only kind of vandalism I endorse: disruptive, not destructive.

I don’t know if the video of me doing that stuff will make it into the documentary. Not surprisingly, watching a middle-aged dude dial a phone number and access pornography over LinkNYC kiosks is not all that interesting.

The conversation with my ex’s mother lingered about as long as politeness would have it. I felt a surge of melancholy remembering what went down, and how it ended with my ex.

But I couldn’t shake my surprise that she asked me about the Softee thing. It got me thinking about the kiosks and asking myself why I don’t give them another try. I had attempted to use them for the Payphone Radio project a few times but the calls almost always sounded like garbage. Yesterday I gave it a more forgiving chance, thinking that under the right circumstances I could actually make passable quality calls. But circumstances had to align.

First, a kiosk had to stand in a quiet spot. That’s not always easy to find. Second, for my sense of public decorum and non-conspicuity I would only use kiosks with no or very few other people around. That’s not out of concern about my public profile or reputation in this ephemeral context of the street. I don’t care if passing strangers think me a raving derelict, talking loudly into a machine they don’t even know can make phone calls.

But I have seen the stares from people for whom the sight of someone screaming into a LinkNYC kiosk does genuinely make them ill at ease, and I do not want to perpetuate that little bit of weirdness.

Concern about getting overheard while making phone calls that will most likely get posted to the public Internet for all the world to hear might seem contrary. But it’s not about the content of the calls, it’s the context. I’m willing to share confessional-like ramblings over Payphone Radio when the calls are made in a more-or-less dignified way, with the modicum of discretion offered by the presence of a semi-enclosed payphone structure and the fact that I don’t have to raise my voice to leave a decent sounding recording. I would feel rude bellowing that kind of stuff into a kiosk, and I’m not much of a bellower anyway.

The posture I must assume to make decent-quality calls on these machines further contributes to me thinking I look derelict. I have to lean up against the machine, my head pressed to the surface, and typically I place both hands on the sides of the machine. I’ve seen other people assume this position and I always think they are sick and getting ready to vomit onto the kiosk.

I also find that I have to stand completely still. If I turn my head one way or the other while talking then the sound of my voice drops out. And unlike payphones, with their acoustically-designed handsets that keep outside noises mostly out, the sounds of car horns and other aural street effluvia barge in on LinkNYC calls with no separation. I decided to just forget about making calls from any of the kiosks located under the noisy roar of the N/W trains on 31st Street, though I have no problem making calls from the acoustically insulated payphones on that stretch of road. The roar of the subway sounds like a relatively distant thunder through the payphones.

I gave LinkNYC a go yesterday, a quiet Sunday afternoon with barely any other people around on a stretch of Northern Boulevard between Queens Plaza and Steinway Street. I unloaded a bunch of melancholia about the encounter with my ex’s mother and other streams of consciousness into one LinkNYC loudspeaker after another (the loudspeaker also functions as the microphone).

The calls turned out decent enough for use in Payphone Radio, though quality was uneven, not unlike calls made from payphones. I hear that familiar claustrophobic VOIP quality, with occasional aural artifacts and twangs that makes me think grasshoppers are jumping around in the call.

In this call I congratulate myself for any part I might have had in getting CityBridge to make 711 accessible from its kiosks, followed by a mini-jeremiad about the different kind of digital divide created by communication technologies designed to keep us connected but that more successfully keep us apart. At about 1:35 to 1:40 you can hear where I turned my face away from the kiosk and my voice drops out.

One unexpected irritant about LinkNYC’s phone calls involves a nag screen that pops up during the call, asking if you are still there. I have to blame myself for this “feature”, which did not exist in the original rollout of LinkNYC. For the first couple of years calls made from LinkNYC could stay connected for as long as 4 hours, an industry standard VOIP hard limit on call duration. This 4-hour call duration contributed mightily to my Mr. Softee prank getting as much of an audience as it did, with people on social media reporting on noise blasting out of nearby kiosks for hours and hours.

The only real retaliation CityBridge came up with to prevent pranks like mine from gaining traction was to limit call length to 10 minutes before disconnecting after no activity. Callers had to touch the screen once in a while to prevent the call from ending. CityBridge later shortened that to 3 minutes, at which time a nag screen pops up asking if you want to continue the call.

At least I think that’s how it is supposed to work. I don’t know how frequently that nag screen reappears or how long calls can continue if you keep responding to them but yesterday it seemed kind of random. During one call the nag screen appeared after just 1½ minutes, reappearing every 15 or 20 seconds thereafter. I found it irritating but have only myself to blame for the fact that all LinkNYC phone users get punished with this little annoyance. I think of it as the Smart City version of the bitchvoice from the old payphones who busts in on your call to demand that you “PLEASE DEPOSIT 25¢ FOR THE NEXT THREE MINUTES.”

All in all the calls are not as bad as expected, but I emphasize that conditions came about as close to perfect as possible. With very little noise on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, and with hardly any people around for me to make uncomfortable, I felt only about half as self-conscious and exposed as I might have in a busier environment. With virtually no loud noise to speak of I did not have to raise my voice or scream to be heard. The lack of wind in the air also didn’t hurt, though you do hear a stiff breeze hit the microphone in the above recording.

As a tangentially-related endnote, I noticed some time ago this surprisingly common quirk among the kiosks. The green and red buttons are in the wrong spots, and thus do not function as one might expect. On this device the red button connects a call, the green one hangs it up. I find this doubly confusing because my intuitive senses say the red button should be on the bottom, the green above it.

Let’s get that LinkNYC Franchise Inspector on top of this.