The 1-900 Number Charged By The Minute And Nobody Was Counting

It was 11:40 PM on a Tuesday.

The TV was still on because you had stayed up to watch Letterman and had instead gotten the back half of an infomercial, and now, before the next infomercial started, there was a different commercial playing. It was two minutes long. It had three different women in satin turbans on it, each of them smiling and nodding at the camera as if to someone off-screen, and in the center of the screen, in a flashing yellow box with a cartoonish starburst behind it, there was a phone number. The phone number started with 1-900. Underneath it, in text barely large enough to read, it said $3.99 per minute.

You were twelve. You read the whole scroll.

The Ecosystem

The 1-900 number was, functionally, a toll call. You dialed it. The phone company billed you. The phone company handed the money - minus their cut - back to whoever owned the number. There was no credit card. There was no sign-up. There was no account. There was you, your parents' phone bill, and a stranger on the other end of the line willing to do something specific for exactly as long as you wanted to pay for it.

Mostly the 1-900 number was psychics. The Psychic Friends Network was a two-hundred-million-dollar business at its peak. The Psychic Readers Network was separate, and smaller, and had Miss Cleo on it. Both of them ran commercials in blocks of thirty-second and two-minute spots after midnight on local UHF, between 2 and 5 AM on cable, and in all the slots nobody with any dignity would buy. The ads were always the same. A woman had just gotten a reading. The reading had changed her life. She was crying, a little. She said I know he's coming back. Miss Lavinia said so. The number scrolled under her chin.

There was you, your parents' phone bill, and a stranger on the other end of the line willing to do something specific for exactly as long as you wanted to pay for it.

But psychics were only the loudest part. The 1-900 number was also dial-a-joke and dial-a-horoscope and dial-a-sports-score and the back page of Boys' Life and the whole last page of the TV Guide. There was a 1-900 number that would read you the current weather in another city. There was one that was just the sound of a toilet flushing, for prank purposes, at a dollar ninety-nine. There was one for Santa, in December, and the man who ran it probably had thirty operators in a warehouse in Reno taking kids' Christmas lists at $2.49 for the first minute and $0.99 for each additional minute. Santa was in Reno. Santa was expensive. Santa did not deliver.

The whole thing was a kind of pre-internet marketplace for attention. Somebody wanted to tell their problems to a stranger. Somebody else wanted to be told that a man named Darryl was coming back into their life soon. A third person wanted the final score of the Michigan game, and this was before the internet, and the number was faster than Teletext, and so a dollar for a dollar it was worth it.

The Scroll

The disclaimer at the bottom of the screen was a universe of its own.

It scrolled in white letters on a black bar, usually in a font that was approximately four pixels tall, and it moved at a speed engineered for people with 20/15 vision and no commercial break ahead of them. It said $3.99 for the first minute, $2.49 per additional minute, must be 18 or older, parental consent required, for entertainment purposes only, call must be placed by someone over the age of eighteen with knowledge of this call, results not typical, no guarantee of accuracy, do not rely on this call for financial, legal, or medical advice. By the time you had read the first clause, the scroll was already into the second half, and the woman in the turban on the main screen was now holding up a tarot card.

The whole disclaimer was there, legally, and it was not there, functionally. That was the point. It satisfied the Federal Trade Commission and it fooled the twelve-year-old watching Letterman at the same time, and both of those were the deliverable.

The Dare

Every kid in the sixth grade knew what a 1-900 number was.

You knew because you had seen the commercials. You knew because somebody's older brother had dared somebody else to call one at a sleepover, and the kid had called it, and the kid had put it on speaker, and a woman with a thick Caribbean accent had said baby, you have called me for a reason, and all five of you had howled laughing, and then one of you had thrown the phone at the floor and screamed HANG UP HANG UP HANG UP, and nobody slept, and in the morning everybody had agreed to never speak of it again.

The dare was the point. The 1-900 number was a forbidden object in the house. Your parents had told you, in the specific flat tone they used for things that were not negotiable, that you were not, under any circumstances, to call a 1-900 number. They had not told you why. The why would have given it away. The why was: it costs money, and I will see it on a piece of paper in nineteen days, and when I see it I will know, and I will come to find you.

You did not call. Mostly.

The Bill

The phone bill arrived on a Friday in a window envelope.

In my house, my mother opened it at the kitchen table on Saturday morning, with coffee, with a highlighter, with the local section of the newspaper folded next to her. The phone bill was eight pages long normally. There were long-distance charges on it that she would read out loud in a vaguely accusatory tone - who called Pennsylvania for twenty-two minutes on the sixth? - and we would all look at our shoes. The bill was a monthly audit of the whole family's communications. It was, in effect, a wiretap you got in the mail.

If there was a 1-900 charge on the bill, you knew it before she said anything. You could see it in her shoulders.

The 1-900 line item was formatted differently. It was in bold. It had a separate line for the service provider, usually something like PACIFIC BELL PREMIUM SVC or ENHANCED SERVICES INC. It had a start time, a duration, and a charge. $17.42. $43.80. $112.09. Whatever a kid had done with the phone at 1 AM three weeks ago when their parents thought they were asleep, it was now a line item, and the line item had a dollar sign in front of it, and the dollar sign could not be erased.

The phone bill was a monthly audit of the whole family's communications. It was, in effect, a wiretap you got in the mail.

The specific horror of the 1-900 charge was its delay. You had made the call three weeks ago. You had already forgotten about it. The call was last month's problem, and you had moved on, and your current problems were a math test and a social studies project, and then the bill arrived, and the past caught up with you at your kitchen table, in bold text, with a service provider name you had never heard of and could not plausibly explain.

Most kids got caught once. Most kids did not get caught twice.

The Argument With Myself

Here is the thing I keep getting stuck on.

The 1-900 number was predatory. It was aimed, with real precision, at lonely people. The ads ran at hours when lonely people were awake. The people on the other end of the line were trained to keep you talking, to extend the call, to say baby, I'm getting another reading, hold on when they wanted to pad another forty seconds. The operators were paid by the minute. The company was paid by the minute. The incentive structure was stay on the phone. The product being sold was your continued attention. The system worked best on people who had nobody else to talk to, and it extracted the most money from the ones who were most alone, and the whole arrangement was, on paper, a kind of structured exploitation of loneliness at scale.

It was a scam.

And also - and this is the part I don't quite know what to do with - the person on the other end was there. A real human. A woman named Miss Lavinia or Miss Cleo or Miss whatever, who may or may not have believed in the cards she was turning over, but who was, for the twelve minutes you were on the phone, giving you her undivided attention, which was more than almost anyone in a lonely person's life was giving them in 1996. It was fake. The attention was not fake. The attention was being purchased, at $3.99 per minute, from a stranger in a call center, and it was in some real sense the only attention somebody was going to get that week.

We fixed the price. We did not fix the loneliness. We just moved the attention economy to a model where you don't pay in dollars, you pay in data and time and a slow erosion of your evening, and nobody ever has to call a satin-turbaned woman at 2 AM to be told that someone named Darryl is coming back, because now a notification does it for free, forty times a day, and the notification is also wrong.

The Scroll At The Bottom

I think about the scroll a lot.

Not the words of it. The fact of it. The decision somebody made in 1993 to run a scroll at four pixels tall at the bottom of a thirty-second ad, knowing that no human watching at full speed could parse it, knowing that it existed only to satisfy the agency that had required it to exist, knowing that the actual communication of the ad - the woman in the turban, the yellow starburst, the ten-digit phone number - was happening above the scroll, in a part of the screen designed to be read.

That was the arrangement the whole decade made with itself. The important thing was always above the scroll. The real thing, the thing that would cost you money or data or your sense of what was true, was in the scroll. You were supposed to know this, and you were supposed to be too dazzled to look, and the scroll was supposed to keep moving.

The scroll is still moving. The font is still four pixels tall. The scroll is now at the bottom of a different screen, in a different app, after a different ad for a different thing, and it still says results not typical.

My phone just lit up with something I did not ask for. I did not read the scroll.

I don't call strangers anymore. I think I used to be better at it.