I’m not exactly sure where ideas start. Maybe I had 6 oz more cold brew one morning, maybe I walked through an electrified force field that synapsed my brain backwards, maybe my noggin wrinkles felt overly phlegmatic in traffic one morning. Regardless of the phenomena I decided to look into and eventually purchase a 1-800 number through an anonymous tip line/HR complaint service.
I do remember vending Vicarious Love when the weather first turned for the better, googling a silent single person booth, then an old pay phone, then a third party voicemail box. The silent sound booth was $4,000 and the pay phone wasn’t in my budget of $0 either. This idea started as a confessional, á la the sacrament of penance, but without the negative connotations. I was thinking the perfect halfway point between one of those tourist walls you leave a love letter on and writing your own secret in the Burn Book.
I find the growing number of people on the ~web who ‘tell on themselves’ to be quite alarming. Whether it’s a celebrity realizing their parenting is unorthodox, even to lizard standards, or a tiktok teenager spilling the in-in-intrusive thoughts on a Wednesday evening completely sober. This attempt is going to try to capture both in a bottle, through a phone line. The shift started to form from in person secret to comfort-of-your-own-home secret.
I don't believe in trade secrets, I believe even less in gatekeeping hyper specific information. Therefore, I'm going to take you on a step by step process. First I gathered between five and ten third party voice mail box services. I asked each one if there’s an option to not receive the number or ID of the caller, each one questioned why and then said no. Next I asked Reddit if there was a possibility of routing three google voice numbers and losing the password to the first one. Not good enough.
After a week or two of just blindly asking around to no leads, I spotted a construction anonymous tip line for violations. I may have called just to see what the process was like, just a voicemail box asking for an address and as much description as possible. Viola Davis! I made contact the next week with a company called Direct Line. Direct Line offers a live agent or simply an anonymous voicemail box meant to taddle on your McDonald’s manager. They offer no log in, no number review, simply a .wav file in a generic auto-email template that gets sent minutes after a message is left. Call quality is pretty clear, I’ll add a sample below from a robot asking me if I would like to update my Google business listing.
So what happens next? To start I’m going to order 1,000 stickers with the phone number on them (I got the last number with TSC-HUSS available). Secondly I’m going to order as many cheap white gildan tees as my wallet can bear with a 20” tall back print so there’s no chance in hell anyone is going to miss it. What kind of messages do I want to receive? I want the tea spilled, the messy disheveled run on sentence conspicuous barefaced truth. Where do we start? The service industry. There’s nothing more captivating than the Pick-Me drama of a restaurant. I have an old friend who still works at my pre-Covid job, a popular Lebanese place. He’s always down for anything, so two dozen shirts slipped in the receiving door should do. There’s a chain of coffee shops with criminally lackluster service on my radar. The baristas would rather rank the Carly Rae Jepsen albums than finish the latte, they should do. I’m not sure what goes on behind the 3” thick bullet proof glass at the post office, but whatever it is they should have the hotline ready.
Should we imply basic rules? It’s probably a good idea to bleep out any last name that could come up. It’s also probably a good idea to bleep out any small business south of … the size of a trendy local franchise? Anything less than five locations? We can save that bridge for crossing. Definitely want to allow people to roast a job like McDonalds or trash a local politician. I guess the main goal of this whole experiment is to not get sued, or get sued and win.
Now let’s discuss the downsides. The minimum amount of time you can buy a 1-800 number for is one year, the HR service bills in 6 month increments. Worst case scenario, this belly flops and we’re just another brand with a phone number. Failure is always the easier option for the universe to dish out. My girlfriend thinks it could gather a dozen calls in a few months while my favorite group of barista’s think I could break a news story with a criminal confession. All in all the total price of this up front, shirts and stickers included, is just shy of $500. i've probably spent more money on worse things. Dare to dream.
So the day before launch I am in the silent bathroom hiding from the sounds of construction next door. I am playing a recorded sound bite from my friend Rocki, who read the script in the beginning of this post, several times in the most robotic way possible. "35 seconds is too long, people are going to hang up" I'm thinking, "1.25 times the speed should get it under 25 seconds and add some extra fabrication." I play the recording from my laptop into my speaker phone, three or four takes and I think we have something not only audible but rightfully kitschy. Saw some friends today who came into the shop to grab a print order, handed them 1-833 tees, asked them not to wear them until tomorrow.
Prediction, first month, fifteen calls. Hopefully a few things of substance. The rest is in the algorithm's hands. I find the most engaged posts on Instagram are posts in which people have something to argue over. People's innermost demon's should hopefully do the trick. I'll update the blog in a few months with a re-read of this post to see how I could've done some things better. For tomorrow, long instagram posts, and a Friday night Fishtown flier hand out.
Thank you for getting this far!
