[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
phone?' I mean, even if it is cool, if you have to ask 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know. 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know. Like those
blind kids, people are going to start putting together their own private telephone companies if they want to really talk. And you know what else.
You don't hear silences on the phone anymore. They've got this time-sharing thing on long-distance lines where you make a pause and they
snip out that piece of time and use it to carry part of somebody else's conversation.Instead of a pause, where somebody's maybe breathing or
sighing, you get this blank hole and you only start hearing again when someone says a word and even the beginning of the word is clipped
off. Silences don't count -- you're paying for them, but they take them away from you. It's not cool to talk and you can't hear someone when
they don't talk. What the hell good is the phone? I wouldn't mind seeing them totally screwed."
The Big Memphis Bust
Joe Engressia never wanted to screw Ma Bell. His dream had always been to work for her.
The day I visited Joe in his small apartment on Union Avenue in Memphis, he w as upset about another setback in his application for a telephone
job.
"They're stalling on it. I got a letter today telling me they'd have to postpone the interview I requested again. My landlord read it for me. They
gave me some runaround about wanting papers on my rehabilitation status but I think there's something else going on."
When I switched on the 40-watt bulb in Joe's room -- he sometimes forgets when he has guests -- it looked as if there was enough telephone
hardware to start a small phone company of his own.
There is one phone on top of his desk, one phone sitting in an open drawer beneath the desk top. Next to the desk-top phone is a cigar-box-
size M-F device with big toggle switches, and next to that is some kind of switching and coupling device with jacks and alligator plugs hanging
loose. Next to that is a Braille typewriter. On the floor next to the desk, lying upside down like a dead tortoise, is the half-gutted body of an old
black standard phone. Across the room on a torn and dusty couch are two more phones, one of them a touch-tone model; two tape recorders;
a heap of phone patches and cassettes, and a life-size toy telephone.
Our conversation is interrupted every ten minutes by phone phreaks from all over the country ringing Joe on just about every piece of
equipment but the toy phone and the Braille typewriter. One fourteen-year-old blind kid from Connecticut calls up and tells Joe he's got a girl
friend. He wants to talk to Joe about girl friends. Joe says they'll talk later in the evening when they can be alone on the line. Joe draws a deep
breath, whistles him off the air with an earsplitting 2600-cycle whistle. Joe is pleased to get the calls but he looked worried and preoccupied
that evening, his brow constantly furrowed over his dark wandering eyes. In addition to the phone-company stall, he has just learned that his
apartment house is due to be demolished in sixty days for urban renewal. For all its shabbiness, the Union Avenue apartment house has been
Joe's first home-of-his-ow n and he's worried that he may not find another before this one is demolished.
But what really bothers Joe is that switchmen haven't been listening to him. "I've been doing some checking on 800 numbers lately, and I've
discovered that certain 800 numbers in New Hampshire couldn't be reached from Missouri and Kansas. Now it may sound like a small thing, but
I don't like to see sloppy work; it makes me feel bad about the lines. So I've been calling up switching offices and reporting it, but they haven't
corrected it. I called them up for the third time today and instead of checking they just got mad. Well, that gets me mad. I mean, I do try to help
them. There's something about them I can't understand -- you want to help them and they just try to say you're defrauding them."
It is Sunday evening and Joe invites me to join him for dinner at a Holiday Inn. Frequently on Sunday evening Joe takes some of his welfare
money, calls a cab, and treats himself to a steak dinner at one of Memphis' thirteen Holiday Inns. (Memphis is the headquarters of Holiday Inn.
Holiday Inns have been a favorite for Joe ever since he made his first solo phone trip to a Bell switching office in Jacksonville, Florida, and
stayed in the Holiday Inn there. He likes to stay at Holiday Inns, he explains, because they represent freedom to him and because the rooms are
arranged the same all over the country so he knows that any Holiday Inn room is familiar territory to him. Just like any telephone.)
Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restaurant of the Holiday Inn Medical Center on Madison Avenue in Memphis, Joe tells me the highlights of his life
as a phone phreak.
At age seven, Joe learned his first phone trick. A mean baby -sitter, tired of listening to little Joe play with the phone as he always did,
constantly, put a lock on the phone dial. "I got so mad. When there's a phone sitting there and I can't use it... so I started getting mad and
banging the receiver up and down. I noticed I banged it once and it dialed one. Well, then I tried banging it twice...." In a few minutes Joe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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phone?' I mean, even if it is cool, if you have to ask 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know. 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know. Like those
blind kids, people are going to start putting together their own private telephone companies if they want to really talk. And you know what else.
You don't hear silences on the phone anymore. They've got this time-sharing thing on long-distance lines where you make a pause and they
snip out that piece of time and use it to carry part of somebody else's conversation.Instead of a pause, where somebody's maybe breathing or
sighing, you get this blank hole and you only start hearing again when someone says a word and even the beginning of the word is clipped
off. Silences don't count -- you're paying for them, but they take them away from you. It's not cool to talk and you can't hear someone when
they don't talk. What the hell good is the phone? I wouldn't mind seeing them totally screwed."
The Big Memphis Bust
Joe Engressia never wanted to screw Ma Bell. His dream had always been to work for her.
The day I visited Joe in his small apartment on Union Avenue in Memphis, he w as upset about another setback in his application for a telephone
job.
"They're stalling on it. I got a letter today telling me they'd have to postpone the interview I requested again. My landlord read it for me. They
gave me some runaround about wanting papers on my rehabilitation status but I think there's something else going on."
When I switched on the 40-watt bulb in Joe's room -- he sometimes forgets when he has guests -- it looked as if there was enough telephone
hardware to start a small phone company of his own.
There is one phone on top of his desk, one phone sitting in an open drawer beneath the desk top. Next to the desk-top phone is a cigar-box-
size M-F device with big toggle switches, and next to that is some kind of switching and coupling device with jacks and alligator plugs hanging
loose. Next to that is a Braille typewriter. On the floor next to the desk, lying upside down like a dead tortoise, is the half-gutted body of an old
black standard phone. Across the room on a torn and dusty couch are two more phones, one of them a touch-tone model; two tape recorders;
a heap of phone patches and cassettes, and a life-size toy telephone.
Our conversation is interrupted every ten minutes by phone phreaks from all over the country ringing Joe on just about every piece of
equipment but the toy phone and the Braille typewriter. One fourteen-year-old blind kid from Connecticut calls up and tells Joe he's got a girl
friend. He wants to talk to Joe about girl friends. Joe says they'll talk later in the evening when they can be alone on the line. Joe draws a deep
breath, whistles him off the air with an earsplitting 2600-cycle whistle. Joe is pleased to get the calls but he looked worried and preoccupied
that evening, his brow constantly furrowed over his dark wandering eyes. In addition to the phone-company stall, he has just learned that his
apartment house is due to be demolished in sixty days for urban renewal. For all its shabbiness, the Union Avenue apartment house has been
Joe's first home-of-his-ow n and he's worried that he may not find another before this one is demolished.
But what really bothers Joe is that switchmen haven't been listening to him. "I've been doing some checking on 800 numbers lately, and I've
discovered that certain 800 numbers in New Hampshire couldn't be reached from Missouri and Kansas. Now it may sound like a small thing, but
I don't like to see sloppy work; it makes me feel bad about the lines. So I've been calling up switching offices and reporting it, but they haven't
corrected it. I called them up for the third time today and instead of checking they just got mad. Well, that gets me mad. I mean, I do try to help
them. There's something about them I can't understand -- you want to help them and they just try to say you're defrauding them."
It is Sunday evening and Joe invites me to join him for dinner at a Holiday Inn. Frequently on Sunday evening Joe takes some of his welfare
money, calls a cab, and treats himself to a steak dinner at one of Memphis' thirteen Holiday Inns. (Memphis is the headquarters of Holiday Inn.
Holiday Inns have been a favorite for Joe ever since he made his first solo phone trip to a Bell switching office in Jacksonville, Florida, and
stayed in the Holiday Inn there. He likes to stay at Holiday Inns, he explains, because they represent freedom to him and because the rooms are
arranged the same all over the country so he knows that any Holiday Inn room is familiar territory to him. Just like any telephone.)
Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restaurant of the Holiday Inn Medical Center on Madison Avenue in Memphis, Joe tells me the highlights of his life
as a phone phreak.
At age seven, Joe learned his first phone trick. A mean baby -sitter, tired of listening to little Joe play with the phone as he always did,
constantly, put a lock on the phone dial. "I got so mad. When there's a phone sitting there and I can't use it... so I started getting mad and
banging the receiver up and down. I noticed I banged it once and it dialed one. Well, then I tried banging it twice...." In a few minutes Joe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]