A few weeks ago I needed a pay phone. Really, I did.

After taking a civil service exam on Queens Boulevard near the courthouse I left the building. I did not have my cell phone. I had anticipated this. One of the boldfaced rules of taking this Civil Service Exam is that no cell phones or electronic devices of any kind shall enter into the testing facility.

I might have been the only test-taker that day who honored this rule. As far as I could tell everyone in the room had cell phones and tablets on them. The City’s high-and-holy commandment that thou shalt not bring these devices to the civil service exam was empty bluster. City workers at the exam provided Ziplock® bags into which phones and devices were sealed and placed where they could not be reached. Room monitors throughout the place made sure no one consulted their devices during this test.

As a consequence of following the rules I spent the balance of the day sans cellphone. I got home hours later. In the meantime I unexpectedly had to make a phone call of a personal and urgent nature. It was exactly the kind of call I would not want to make over a LinkNYC kiosk, which I did not even realize lined the other side of Queens Boulevard’s 4,000 lanes of traffic.

There was something I had to talk to someone about. I did not want to have to scream my side of this discussion into a public terminal while the voice of the person I called blasted from the kiosk’s loudspeaker. I wanted to make a phone call in a way tradition dictates phone calls are made: With a goddam handset.

I finally found a working payphone. Two of them, in fact, side-by-side, both bearing scratchiti from the hands of my New York City payphone hero PRAY.

The call connected. Everything worked out. Hooray for the old new world.

The idea of that conversation taking place in a way that all passers-by could hear made me ill.

The job at stake with the Civil Service Exam?: 311 Call Center Representative. Having nurtured romantical notions about the job I soured on it upon arrival at the test-taking place. Not mentioned in any of the announcements about this exam: Test results take a full year to come back. (Whoever grades these tests has real job security.) I don’t know if the 311 CCR spot is considered something holy or sacred but I had no expectation that getting it (or not getting it) would be a year-long journey. It is the first government-like job I ever went for so maybe my ignorance is to blame. Online comments I read said this was a 3- or 4-month process from the time of application to getting or not getting the job.

I don’t expect brownie points for following the no-cell-phone rule. But it would have been something if they had taken interest in the people who applied for that job. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your personality type, or anything else. Getting this job depends entirely on your ability to take a test. No verbal interactions occurred, no essay writing, nothing but multiple choice questions.

It may seem contrary that somebody like I who takes on the Smart City nonsense in public ways would want to work for the City. But I let myself feel enchantment with the idea of sitting in a room all day answering questions about the minutiæ of New York City. I wanted to know what New Yorkers took time out of their days to complain about. I wanted to be the CCR in the room who knew all the answers and knew immediately how to make appropriate referrals.

Such notions quickly evaporated, and not just on account of the year-long hiring process. I desire a job with order and structure. But this position sounded like it existed within an almost militaristic framework this twitchy tangential type could never fit into.

I could have just got up and left the testing facility. But having paid my $47 non-refundable application fee I figured I might as well get my money’s worth and take this test for a ride. I did poorly, having preëmptively decided I did not want the job anymore. Vision problems I still experience from an eye injury last year did not help either. But I can’t blame that for anything except the headache that developed while taking the test.

For me to apply for City jobs probably sounds contrary to my LinkNYC/Softee antics and other shenanigans. But it makes sense to me. I know myself as one with irritatingly non-dogmatic abilities to understand all sides of a situation. Sometimes that makes me a contrarian. I consider the contrarian a valuable role in planning publicly-accessed products.

I applied for a job at LinkNYC back in 2015. At the time I thought this “payphone of the future” project might welcome someone who knew a lot about New York’s payphones. I also thought my corporate years in New Media couldn’t hurt.

They totally ignored me. I know… whomp-whomp-whomp. I more recently inquired of the company’s HR contact about possibilities. She, too, ignored me. This and other petty smallball encounters I had with the company suggest that with their sweetheart monopoly franchise deal they don’t need anything other than what they’ve got.

So I applied for something else at DoITT, the city agency that administers the LinkNYC program. The position had nothing to do with LinkNYC, as far as I could tell. So far they’ve ignored me but the City takes its time, as I now know from the 311 CCR experience.

I don’t think I would bring value to the City. I am a creative thinker. The spirit of me saying that about myself has no whiff of self-flattery. I believe that in most contexts creative thinking is an irritating pain in the ass more likely to be singled out for ridicule than admiration.

A favorite example of mine is John Poindexter. He imagined a “Policy Analysis Market”, a stock-market sort of setup where people could invest in where they think terrorist attacks would occur. It’s a stupid, offensive idea which neither Poindexter nor anyone else had any intention of implementing. Dumbass ideas like the Policy Analysis Market are the kind of shit you get through to get to the good ones.

I also knew of a CEO who insisted all corporate meetings take place with everybody standing up. All attendees hated this crap but submitted to it anyway. But like it or not that idea of standing meetings is creative thinking. It is bad creative thinking. Most creative thinking is garbage. This CEO did not have the self deprecating quality needed to recognize it as that.

I used to think highly of Frank Zappa’s comments on what creative people should do with their lives. He implored talented and creative people to get into government, not the arts. The government, Zappa said, needs more creative thinking, not the arts.

But I’ve come to think Zappa a little naïve on this particular count. Did he work a single day in government to test his theory that creative thinking had value there? No he did not.