Summer-like weather has finally made it to New York, which means we will see a lot more people like the individual in this photo making themselves comfortable curbside at their favorite LinkNYC kiosk. People still pull up chairs and monopolize LinkNYC kiosks, this long after CityBridge neutralized “wide-spread porn usage” by eliminating the web browser’s easy access to the open Internet. You can still get to the open WWW, and to pornography, but that obtusely convoluted path to porn remains my little secret.

I never believed that porn usage on these machines ever reached “wide-spread” levels, as media outlets reported. But some stories are too good to die, regardless of their factual basis. The association between LinkNYC and porn will outlast the CityBridge/LinkNYC franchise, inhabiting the same cultural milieu of accepted lies as the claim that Al Gore said he invented the internet, or that ratings for “Happy Days” tanked after the episode where Fonzie jumped over a shark. There is a strand of schadenfreude whereby people take satisfaction in seeing the reputation or stature of individuals or entities suffer permanent debasement over something that did not even happen.

I passed this same kiosk earlier today, as a gentleman carried on a phone conversation. Both sides of the conversation were audible to anybody in the area — it had something to do with his sister needing money.

At the moment I passed I glanced at the tablet. The “STILL THERE?” nag screen appeared, intruding upon this person’s conversation. I wanted to apologize to the guy, and explain to him how the nag screen that pops up every 3 minutes asking if you are still there is my fault.

The 3-minute nag represents the only tangible step CityBridge ever took in response to my Summer of Softee. Blocking the phone numbers I called doesn’t count, because it had zero effectiveness. LinkNYC callers first got the nag screen after 10 minutes. CityBridge later changed that to 3 minutes. Neither of these measures had any impact on my pursuit. At the time it seemed to me this nag screen only served to punish the innocent users of these kiosks, who allegedly make ½ a million calls a month (a number I suspect is hugely bloated).

But for CityBridge, at least, implementing the call timeout seemed to play well in social media.

Even when my noise-blasting phone calls could have lasted as long as four hours they almost never did. That’s because people are not stupid. When someone on the street hears obnoxious noise blasting out of a piece of electronic street furniture their instinct is to find a kill switch, specifically the red button on the physical keypad. Few of my calls lasted more than a few minutes.

I wanted to explain to the dude using the LinkNYC phone today how, in the good old early days of this stuff, you could have talked nag-free for up to 4 hours, the hard limit on length of VOIP phone calls as imposed by carriers such as Vonage and Ringcentral.

But then I thought on it again, regaining my grown-up perspective on the reality of things. I gave myself some credit for playing a role in pushing the functional workings of these machines beyond Kiosk 101, and for making usage of them accountable, even if that level of accountability involves nothing more than proving your alertness. It’s like a “Prove You Are Human” web page captcha, but for phone calls.

I watched as this gentleman performed the flourish of tapping the screen to confirm his existence. I take credit for that gesture entering into the city’s prestidigitational repertoire.