apple juice

For the past couple years maybe, we’ve been exiting this particular highway, turning east, and driving towards our neighborhood. Out of the corner of our eyes, depending on who was driving, or who was staring out the window, not looking at their phone, someone would notice something on the sound barrier wall.

“Someone has put climbing holds on that wall!”, my wife was sure of it every time she caught a glimpse.

“There’s no way they could get away with that, it must be some acoustic panels or something,” I’d respond. The kids would crane their necks, but the brief moment where the angle was correct for looking back meant we could never get a close look.

Last week we drove to a different mountain bike trailhead and had a rare drive without the kids. My wife said, “could we go have a look at that wall?”

We exited off the highway, doubled back along the frontage road and parked the car. Walking up towards the wall, we both let out a big laugh.

It was not climbing holds, or sound panels, or anything of that nature. A guerrilla art installation, performance art, I guess you’d call it?

There were hundreds of phones mounted to back of this sound wall.

And located down on the wall, was this box:

Opening it up we found another phone, waiting to be hung up:

The instructions made me laugh out loud as well.

I’m having a hard time parting ways with all of this old tech that we have around the house and at school. Most of the time, it still works, maybe needs a new battery, but definitely still performs the functions it was designed to perform. This exhibit of phones, probably mostly working when they went up there, connecting us to “no one” was pretty poignant.

Days later, I’m still thinking about this. I recently watched Cabel Sasser’s presentation at the XOXO conference, and the message, “go down every rabbit hole” really struck me. We could have kept driving past this location for years, and might not have ever seen it if we hadn’t interrupted our typical route to go have a look. It was such an unexpected moment of joy to find this out in the world.

Cabel references his earlier talk from 2013, and I took a few minutes to view that one as well. It’s a personal story of how he worked through a difficult time leading the company that he co-founded. The thing I took away from that talk though was the very real humans that are behind the software and hardware that we use every day. I feel like, at least in the Mac community, (whatever that means anymore) that I’ve been using software, made by real people for decades now. Often times the same software over many different versions and operating systems.

I’m not sure we as a society ever think about the actual people who make software and hardware. Artists, authors, musicians are fairly present and inextricable to the work they produce. When you go to a concert, the musicians are right there. We know there is a person behind the book that you’re reading. Their name is right there on the front. After a bit of research there is, in fact, a human behind the phone wall we found. (In their case, I think the anonymity is a bit of a feature but who’s sense of humor I would probably very much enjoy.)

I hope you’ll stop and go down those rabbit holes out there in the world, and also, open up that About… menu in that app you’re using, have a look at the names and learn a bit about them.