"My name is christie." "I feel like, right now, I'm at a very dead end place, spiritually." "I feel like I'm kind of here by myself, that I really need encouragement." "And I just need to hear somebody on the other end of the phone." "My husband and our son-in-laws all lost their jobs in an automotive plant." "We lost everything we had." "I felt like I was being..." "Pulled, literally pulled, into a place of helplessness." "All I could think about was ending my life." "The day that I actually took 30 sonata sleeping pills to kill myself, I knew that my husband was... it was his first day back to work." "He'd been on family medical leave with me for several months." "And I had waited for him to leave." "I got those sleeping pills." "I took that whole bottle." "And laid on my bed and just started to pray." ""Dear God, please let my kids know I love them." ""Please forgive me for this." ""I'm sorry." "I'm so sorry." "I just can't do it anymore."" "¶¶" "As far as calls that stayed with me, there is one, uh, that was..." "I should have paid her." "So this old guy calls." "Man, it's like 1:00, 2:00 in the morning." "It was sort of, as the call went on, more and more information came out." "Her mother died when she was four, her father abandoned her." "Her brother's 25, he's currently dying of aids." "And she was the only girl boxer at her school." "He was a hardworking man, but once he lost his arm, he had a disability." "He says, "I can't..." "I can't fall asleep."" "Would you just talk to me?" "And there was this pause, and then the person started crying." "And then the cards start to change." "And they start to talk about a death in the family." "And we kept going over the same type of problem." "He said, "oh, yeah, I've been through this." "And this is how I came back."" "So I sing this guy merle haggard," ""sing me back home."" "He's asking these huge questions, these big, existential questions of sort of like," ""what happens to us when we die?"" "I was like, "oh, my God, that's so amazing!" "I'm so happy for you!"" "And he sounded so free." "Even right now, just saying it, the back of my hair is standing up." "I could hear the independence in his voice." "Click." "And that was it." "Our goal is really to make sure that we're providing a connection and support to people that are often feeling extremely isolated." "Many of our calls are from very conservative parts of the country, um..." "Deep South, parts of the midwest, where people often don't feel comfortable or safe talking to friends of family or..." "Other people at school or coworkers." "I started as a volunteer with the local hotline in New York City, which at that time was called the gay switchboard." "And... we wanted to reserve our toll-free number." "We didn't have an office yet, we were just still talking about it, so we were meeting in my living room in greenwich village, you know, me and about six or seven other people that were forming it." "Within hours after the phone company did that, my phone just started ringing off the hook." "And I said to people, "how did you find us?" "We're not listed anywhere." "We're not open yet."" "And they said, "oh, I called toll-free information." ""I just said, you know, 'I need a gay hotline, ' and they gave me your number."" "So, you know, it told me then, yeah, people are gonna want our services." "For a lot of the people that call us, they've never knowingly spoken to an openly glbt person before." "And that's a huge deal for them." "And they've often never said a lot of these words out loud, um, even to themselves." "Well, you can talk with me." "I'm a peer counselor here." "Oh, that makes a lot of sense, yeah." "It's been a little surprise to me, just the amount of people that are out there that are really just looking for someone to talk to, someone to listen to them for a little bit, and in particular someone who can understand" "some of their experiences around their sexual or gender identity." "The call that will stay with me forever and... was a phone call that I answered the very first couple of months that the national hotline opened." "And it was from this 14-year-old kid in the midwest." "And, towards the end of the call, he said he wanted to just kind of tell me something." "And he explained to me that, every day, when he walked home from school, he... he had to go through this kind of..." "I guess wooded area, and there was a bridge that he would have to cross over." "And he would walk across the bridge, and when he got to the middle of the bridge, he would look down into the river, and he would think about whether that was gonna be the day that he was gonna jump or not." "And... we had a very long conversation after that and talked a lot about self-esteem and self-worth." "And I remember, at the end of the call, he said to me, "you know, I'm still gonna go over" ""that bridge every day, but I'm not gonna look down anymore."" "I wonder how many people have actually called hotlines and either have forgotten or don't think of themselves as hotline callers." "Call the wrestlemania 8 hotline right now!" "Oh, man, it's called the new rap hotline!" "¶ Freddie freaker ¶" "Estimated ufo sightings and extraterrestrials..." "Call she-ra and me at..." "Hotline." "Word." "It'll blow your mind, so call us..." "This call is free!" "The first thing that comes to mind are probably sex hotlines." "The ones that are advertised, you know, if you stay up too late watching television." "But then, if you think about it," "I realize that there are a number of..." "Various kinds of hotlines." "Make the call to the veterans crisis line..." "Is life's struggle weighing you down?" "Let us pray with you." "Bullying has become a nonstop threat to our youth today." "Are you keeping a secret?" "If you're being sexually abused, there is someone who can help." "Call the samaritans." "So when I think about what a hotline is, it's not just someone calling someone that they don't know, but it's under a particular context." "It's for a particular reason, typically." "And maybe that's social interaction." "Maybe that's actually getting help." "Maybe that's just getting information." "But it's about people trying to connect with other people." "¶¶" "You come from a line of people that have had more than one, for lack of a better choice of words, paranormal experience." "You are not afraid." "You're very, very open to it." "Um, but you're a little bit of a control freak, and so that part of it makes it a little bit, um, out of your comfort zone." "All right?" "Because what..." "I am a trained priestess." "I have many ways and abilities to divine information." "If you want to give it a very clear, uh, definition." "I do many things, um..." "But I absolutely commune and chat with those on the other side." "Some call them the dead." "Some call them spirits." "Um, you know, names." "I wait for the spirits to tell me which deck to..." "to... to utilize." "Now, I'm looking at your numbers, and I know that you are a very, um, a very maternal person." "Your middle number is a four." "I'm known for, moreover than anything..." "Anything else, the following phrase:" "Call me now." "Find out what I see for you." "Call me now for a free tarot reading!" "I worked for the psychic readers network." "You used to pick up anything that was nearby and just lob it at the ex-husband." "And I was able to work from my home." "Um, and you're given an extension and told what the rules are, et cetera, et cetera." "During the interview, they ask you for a reading." "Whoever the person is on the other end of the phone." "And you give them a reading, and that's what I did." "Um, and it wasn't much more than that." "I thought..." "I was believing the commercial." "I thought you needed to get on there and get somebody their reading in three minutes." "You know, and so I'm taking calls, and I'm pushing stuff out in five minutes and seven minutes, and then I realized, that's not good." "They don't want you to do that." "In order to stay in high priority on the phone line, your phone calls needed to average 18 minutes or more." "Now, I made 24 cents a minute." "That was on the high end." "A lot of people were making anywhere from 12 to 15, 16 cents a minute." "And that's what I heard on the grapevine." "If someone called me on the line, and I knew that they didn't have any money," "I had no intention of keeping them on the line." "And I would say, "okay, baby, I got to go now." ""You're spending your money." ""You need to save that money." ""You see that bill that's sitting over there?" ""You need to go deal with that." "Okay, I love you." "Good-bye."" "It wasn't always an opportunity for them to say," ""but no, wait!" No, no, no." "And that was more about me rather than them." "And I say that, even though it was their pocketbook, it was, again, more about my karma." "Well, ultimately, that drove my averages down." "And, when your averages are low, then you fall way back in the rotation, you know?" "But, um, that's what got me into trouble, uh, was that concept." "What helped me out was the fact that people kept dialing back and asking for my extension." "We get a tremendous amount of callers who talk to us about what they're afraid to tell their therapist." "They don't want their therapist thinking poorly of them." "We have callers who are isolated." "Personality-wise, they may be not comfortable in relating to people, and they don't have any friends." "Love, love, love!" ""Does he love me?" "Does he not love me?" ""Will she love me, will she not love me?" ""Will they marry, is she cheating with somebody else?" "Is he really thinking about somebody else while..."" "that's what all of the calls were about." "Sometimes the children just want to, you know, talk to an adult." "¶¶" "Kids who call us are not calling because they are sitting down, fresh at their homework, and they have already asked their big brother for help, they have already tried... they are calling because they are frustrated," "and so we need to be the people who lift them up and who make them go back to school the next day, feeling empowered." "And now, you have to multiply the last two terms." "Mm-hmm, yeah, or 16x squared minus y squared." "I would say 99.99% of the people who call want help." "You sit in a classroom with 30 students, 30 of them don't want help." "Our biggest priority is to be nice to these students." "Uh, give them a nice adult to talk to, and they said that some students will call just to have a nice conversation with an adult." "A lot of people have great credibility gap trying to believe that you can teach over the telephone." "I was never skeptical about this, ever." "The biggest obstacle we face is trying to convince people that this can be done." "I've never doubted that it could be done." "When we're adding fractions, the denominator, the bottom number in the fraction, it has to be the same." "One of the things we always try to do is, when we're finished with a call, is to tell them that they worked really hard." "You know, we want to emphasize the importance of the..." "Effort rather than that, "oh, you're really smart."" "Some of them might be a little negative towards you and not want to work, but some of them usually rise to the challenge and they're..." "they want to please you and they want to impress you, and they want to... they want to s... they want to hear that, "good job!" "Oh, you did great!" They like hearing that." "The homework hotline, it's a way to give them what they need to be a successful adult." "In a perfect world, for me, everyone would call us on the phone." "Because, having the ability to hear each other gives us additional information." "And the power of the voice I think is very, very important." "A direct conversation with a living person has a... a magic to it." "Has a personal quality to it." "Think about when you were a little kid." "You... you might be sitting with somebody." "You're looking at their fingernails or you're, "what do they smell like?"" "When it's telephone, you have nothing but the voice, and I think it leads to more focus and more concentration." "I think there can be a certain kind of warmth and comfort to just hearing someone's voice and... and also being able to really, like, understand what somebody's feeling, by how they talk and how they're saying it" "that also doesn't get translated in other kinds of..." "Communication." "I have to hear the sound of your voice." "You know, the..." "the rhythm of it." "The pace, the tones." "That's what allows me to connect to you." "Hurting people really know when you're real, because they're at a level of desperation." "When you're at a level of desperation, your eyes and your senses are open and you are searching for somebody who is coming from an authentic place." "So your b.S. Detector is on high." "I was a dj at a skating rink, and this psych nurse came in, and I guess she saw the way" "I worked with people or the kids, and she offered me a job at a psychiatric facility." "We had a, uh, a crisis hotline." "I started out taking crisis call, and now I work in what's known as mobile crisis." "And, basically, I cover a five county area and any sort of psychiatric crisis that is in that area..." "Um, the client can call themselves, or it may be a call from a hospital, a counseling agency, a jail." "It can be a call from anybody who's in crisis." "Uh, and then they will pass that situation on to me if they are not able to triage it themselves." "When somebody starts to tell you their story, and you realize, "that's a lot like my story,"" "you find pieces of yourself in that story." "Man, you can watch them and learn... really learn some things." "And it does help, you have to go to those dark places in yourself and work with it." "You can't, and not do this." "Excuse me." "Mobile crisis." "Okay, good deal." "What you got?" "Auditory hallucinations?" "Okay, yeah." "History of bipolar?" "Cocaine and thc." "All right, I'll go see him." "U.M.C. E.R., right?" "All right, thanks, Cornelia." "I've been doing hotline, crisis line work for about 17 years now..." "To a point to where I actually go out and meet face-to-face with people in crisis." "You know, this psychotic guy called me the psychiatric Batman one night, and I just loved that." "There's always that mystery in the night, man." "Anything can happen after midnight." "Late magnifies loneliness." "Magnifies..." "Desperation." "And that's... that's always where I wanted to be." "Jesus said, "I didn't come for the religious people." "I came for the misfits."" "That's where I got put." "No matter what I did in life, always ended up with misfits." "You know, the scoundrels and the rebels and the down-and-outers." "And the psychotic and the depressed and the drunks." "And those were my people." "And no matter what else I tried to do, those were the people I ended up with." "You know, even..." "as long as I've been doing it," "I still don't feel fit for it." "And, you know, whatever that makes you, it makes you." "But it can make mobile crisis really difficult sometimes." "And, you know, I mean, I am blessed at this part in my life to where I can do it one night, and then I get some time away from it." "'Cause if I don't have that time away from it, it starts to get to me." "Almost everybody that volunteers, so, when you ask them, "why did you decide to volunteer?"" "The answer is almost universally," ""I wanted to be there for the next person that's still struggling."" "And, in many ways, yeah, it is kind of..." "I'm talking to myself 20 years ago, or whatever it is." "Um, and I want to make sure that the struggles that I went through are gonna be easier for the next person." "I think it... it takes a special kind of person to be attracted to work like this, because it is so hard, and it can be so hard to talk with somebody on the phone who's on the verge of killing themselves." "It can be really..." "it's difficult." "It's very difficult." "I work with people who all want to be here." "Every day, without question." "How do you know it?" "Because the vast majority of them do it for free." "And those who get paid here get paid pretty poorly, uh, and still want to work here." "Samaritan, New York City, uh, is the only community-based organization completely devoted to suicide prevention." "We run the city's 24-hour confidential suicide prevention hotline." "We don't trace calls." "We don't use caller I.D." "Uh, we don't use any technology in any manner, uh, to follow up, trace, track, any caller to the hotline." "Well, it sounds like you get frustrated when you're out and about and there's a lot of noise going on and stuff like that." "So it would make sense why you would feel more comfortable at home." "We believe that the great benefit of volunteers is that you can go to therapy once a week, or be in a support group, but what do you do the other 6 days and 23 hours a week?" "Uh, you need someone to be able to bounce your feelings off of who's not coming from a set state of mind, school of thought." "So it's meant to create balance in what we refer to as the caring community." "I thought I was a good listener before I went into training, but I think a lot of people realize, um, when you actually go through an intensive active listening communications training, it really..." "Makes you confront, um, some of your conceptions about yourself." "Most people are not effective communicators." "They think they are." "Uh, but when you challenge them to listen to what someone just said and respond literally to the content of what they said and keep their own opinions, attitudes, and perspectives out of it, you find very few people that can do that." "Samaritans." "Can I help you?" "Suicide's a very ambivalent act." "And thinking you want to die and dying are two very different things." "So the fact that there's some ambivalence or you want someone to talk to, or you want someone to share your thoughts with, leaves a window of opportunity to connect with that person." "People who have a connection tend to get through their difficult times." "That night that I talked to the..." "Counselor on the phone," "I was about to my last straw again." "And probably only hanging on by a thread." "It finally just, like, escalated to a point where I had to call someone." "Hello, like, I'm telling you, something's wrong with me." "You have to help me validate it, because if you say there's something wrong with me, then I'm gonna believe something's wrong with me." "Just skimming through hustler, you know, you find all kinds of different ads for, uh, sex lines and things like that." "Basically, I went across and I saw this sex line and it said it was only 65 cents a minute." "So, um, one day, I just decided to try it and see what it would be like." "There's a lot of hurting people right now, in this country." "It's just a mess." "And people are looking at every turn for some kind of validation or some kind of comfort." "Something that's gonna unify us." "She was talking to me and asking me different things about me or my life, and I don't know if she was just trying to do that to prolong the conversation or if she was doing that 'cause she was really" "trying to get to know me." "So it was nice for me to be able to pray with a complete stranger on the phone that I knew that I wasn't gonna have to sit next to them at church or see them in Walmart." "It was just someone that had a pure heart, and that would be that." "Tell you what, if I, uh, could afford it," "I would probably call every day." "Because I love having phone sex that much." "I was having, frankly, suicidal thoughts." "Which is pretty distressing, you know, the idea that you even have those thoughts." "Um, and the stigma around suicidal thoughts is such that I can't just bring this up with people, because they'll panic." "So, um, I know that hotlines exist." "So, I thought I would give them a try." "I liked it because it was free." "I liked it because it was anonymous." "Um, and I liked that there was a small variety of them, so if one didn't work, I would give another one a try." "I became more and more alone." "And the only thing I had were these thoughts that kept telling me," ""wow, you are such a failure here." ""Um, you're incredibly stupid." ""You have a job to do, your dream job, and you are completely failing."" "You've reached what you think is the top of your career, and you've totally blown it." "So, what are you supposed to do now?" "Just fade away?" "Um, just sort of drift and become a loser?" "Or how about, you know, do the honorable thing and kill yourself?" "They can't remember me as a complete and utter failure." "Well, when I was having these thoughts," "I wanted to talk to a person," "I just didn't want to talk to a person who was going to freak out." "Actually, the last of the hotline calls I made was when I was in, of all places," "Bryant park in the middle of New York City." "It was a surprisingly short call." "You know, I talked for maybe less than 10 minutes, and the woman was like, "okay, well, I need to go now,"" "and that was that." "Um, and that sort of surprised me." "Like, "okay..." "We haven't..." ""did I say something wrong?" "I mean... am I not compelling enough?"" "Um... so I don't know if that call just set me off forever, but I haven't called a hotline since." "Um, but then again, I haven't been to that depth of crisis, either." "I realized that, when I called these hotlines, it was the first time that I had said openly, um... what was going through my mind." "I mean, it's one thing to just think it over and over and over, and drive yourself crazy, but it's another thing to just sort of put it out there and have others hear it." "So to understand the history of the phone is really to understand a history of mediated communication, which would encourage you to think back to the postal system and think about the way that people have used technology to communicate and to interact with one another." "And particularly when it is mediated, whether it be by a phone or a piece of paper, there is a distance that can occur." "What makes the telephone truly revolutionary is, it's the first time you can have conversation without physical proximity." "Mr. Watson, come here." "I want you." "It's not sending a message." "It's having a conversation." "It's interactive." "Bell, I heard every word you said, distinctly." "As att put it in the 1890s," ""the mail is quick." "The telegraph is quicker." ""But the telephone is instantaneous, and you don't have to wait for an answer."" "And that's something new in the world." "How does the telephone work, Uncle bill?" "Magic?" "No, not magic, susie, but science." "The science of sound waves and electricity." "One of the discoveries of reality in the... in American cities of the turn of the century, of course, was that, uh, you saw lots and lots of strangers." "People would come to a bar, they'd sit down, and they'd talk to people next to them." "The hotline is the telecommunications stranger sitting next to you at a bar." "I never drink alone." "Nobody in the first 50 years of the telephone's existence imagined that you would call on the telephone to get advice from a stranger." "After world war ii, there's a kind of growth." "People move to the suburbs." "They're less likely to know their neighbors." "Uh, and as they move away from family and move away from neighbors that they know, the need for advice doesn't go away." "Go ahead, call her." "You'll feel better." "So, after a while, we begin to see the rise of people saying, "call this number, and you can get some advice on various things."" "So avp's mission is... we're dedicated to eliminating violence, to not only victims of hate violence, but also victims or survivors of intimate partner violence, domestic violence, and sexual violence." "What we really look for is someone wanting and willing to support survivors of violence." "Community citizenship now is an organization that provides free immigration law services to immigrants throughout New York City." "The hotline, I think, is successful because it's anonymous." "Many of the callers are not here lawfully, and so they would not want their identity to be revealed." "Teenline is a teen to tween crisis hotline, where teens from across the United States call in, and we're here to offer them support, give out referrals to different organizations." "Really give them that person to listen to." "The teens that work on the hotline are called listeners because we want them to listen." "We find listening is therapeutic." "Telling someone what to do doesn't cut it." "I feel so honored that people feel comfortable enough to open up to a stranger." "Um, people have told me, "you're the first person" "I've told that I cut."" ""You're the first person I've told that I'm gay."" "I'm so honored that I could be that person, and I want to show that the best way I can, through my voice." "¶¶" "People confess to me because I'm anonymous, and it's this... they can't talk to their friends and family about certain things, so they'll call me and say, "you know," ""I cheated on my boyfriend." "I feel terrible." "He's not gonna find out." "How do I get through that?"" "And she's not gonna tell her best friend Sarah, maybe, that, because then Sarah might think differently of her, or... you know, she can't tell her family." "So they call to vent." "Sometimes, you need to tell somebody your secrets..." "But that person can't be in your life, because you can't afford to have those secrets come back to you." "They'll tell you that deepest, darkest secret, and they'll say, "I've never told another person this."" "I'll say, "well, you can tell me."" "People want to unload." "They're carrying around such burdens." "They're carrying around such pain." "You know, and I think that's... there's something very healthy in being able to do that." "Just telling somebody, "man, this is what I'm going through."" "The prayer line is a confessional, in a lot of ways." "A friend of mine, uh, has loaned this space out to us." "So we have this beautiful window here that we can advertise, and my phone number is listed right there." "Which is sort of a dangerous thing, sometimes, to have your personal phone number." "Uh, 700 club hotline, they're doing such tremendous work." "The tbn, all the different help li... they're doing tremendous work." "But these people might be calling from California." "And they're located in Virginia beach." "You know, here..." "I live in finleyville." "This is my town, so..." "And, you know, I feel like I can provide more of a personal touch." "This is the main thoroughfare, main intersection of finleyville." "People have to come to a stop sign, they look over." ""Oh, man, I'm gonna call that guy." "I'm gonna..." "I got an issue." "Maybe he can help me."" "And so we get a..." "I get a lot of phone calls from people that just pass by." "We have a 24/7 prayer coordinator, and, um, whatever prayer requests come into the ministry, she'll post it on this back wall, all right?" "So, if someone comes in to pray for their own personal needs or whatever, they're gonna be directed to also pray for maybe a few of these on the wall." "And when we get answers to prayer, we post them over here on this side." "So there's praise reports on this side of... of answers to prayer to some of these prayer requests over here." "The whole time that I'm on the phone talking to someone," "I'm praying for wisdom." "And you just know it at the right moment." "I mean, I feel like God's given me that ability to know the right moment when I should pray." "And... and I'll say to the person," ""ma'am or sir, I really feel like we need to pray right now."" "And a lot of times, you know, and they'll say thank you." "They'll be very appreciative of the prayer." "And we'll move on from there." "But I feel like God has given me an ability to be a help line in many different areas through my life experience." "You look at our state of our country today," "I mean, I feel like religion is being beaten up." "I mean, you know, God is being beaten up." "God's being removed from everything." "You can't have the ten commandments, the... you know, removed from, you know, all over the place." "Schools, the supreme court, everywhere." "I mean, you know, and people, like, are... you know, they're almost afraid to talk about God." "With, you know, for instance, the touchy subjects today." "You know, how does the church feel about homosexual marriages?" "How does the church feel about this?" "Abortion and all these different types of things." "Well, I have..." "yeah, I have my... my strong, godly views on those things." "But I do know that, um, you know, God loves people." "You know, that, you know, is... you know, according to my faith," "I homosexuality a sin?" "Yes." "But... but does that mean I don't..." "I don't, you know, I can't talk to these people," "I can't be around the people?" "No." "No, I want to be able to help, you know, every person." "The main thing I do, I direct them to God and I pray for them." "Because he has all the answers." "People call us, we will listen." "We will pray, and we'll direct them to our heavenly father." "¶¶" "People behave differently with the... under the guise of anonymity than they would if they had to look you in the eye, which is why, for both good and bad, people come to phone lines for whatever they need." "The anonymity of that hotline allows a caller to end the conversation at whatever point they may hit an overload." "Every time, it's a blank slate." "They don't know you, you don't know them." "Uh, we don't know the backgrounds." "You don't know who you're going to get." "But it could be something wonderful." ""And kristen smiles, knowing he thinks it was an accident." ""And then there's that unmistakable feel" ""of a pointed leather stiletto sliding" ""up the inside of his calf now," ""pressing the sole of her shoe right up against his crotch."" "Mmm." "I'm certainly an anomaly as far as phone sex operators go." "There are very few of us who use their real pictures." "There are even fewer who use their legal names." "I... it makes sense to me to be who I really am, and then to be able to use my acting and my creative endeavors and my playwriting and everything and my phone sex to cross-pollinate and help promote and..." "and be, you know, have my acting self, my kink and poly self, my phone sex operator self, all be in one package, so I didn't have to keep, you know, compartmentalizing everything." "I didn't have a need to." "Other people do, I didn't." "So that's why I made the choice for me to start using my real name and my real pictures." "I run my own company." "February will be nine years that I've been doing phone sex." "Everybody has like this concept of a bunch of people in a warehouse somewhere, you know, like the call center." "Um, but I take my calls in... at home." "I mean, when I'm home," "I am available pretty much 24/7." "If I need a break, I make myself busy, or I log out." "If I have to leave and run an errand, I log out." "Um..." "But, as far as when I'm available to take calls, there's not really any rhyme or reason." "I don't like get up and log in at 10:00 A.M." "And then I'm done at 4:00 P.M." "Um, because that's not really the way the business comes in." "But don't forget that, like, over 50% of the population is on the east coast." "Is on the east coast, yeah." "This is actually like an idea I have for marketing which is like how do you pinpoint those men who are isolated with very few women?" "How do you advertise to the barracks and the oil field in Nebraska?" "Yeah." "How do you advertise to the guys that work on the rigs up in Alaska?" "Those guys, 'cause they make money." "And they are horny, and they're isolated." "It's a marketing thing, also, but also, it's like, this group of guys that are lonely and really want to get off, and just all the fantasies that you can get into with all these different guys." "It just... that's the turn-on." "The very, very basest level I can take any call and talk it down to..." "Here's a human being..." "Who wants to be seen..." "Witnessed..." "At their... what they perceive to be their most repugnant, repulsive, vulnerable, um, unattractive, their basest, their most awful self." "They want to have that witnessed, and for somebody to tell them, "you're okay."" "¶¶" "When I made the, uh, transition from the, uh, hotline, um, I..." "I giggle, because, once again," "I think I was on the verge of being fired." "When somebody said, "you know what?" "This particular extension is getting a lot of activity."" "And so they asked me would I want to participate in a commercial?" "And I said, "no."" "Um, and, uh, that was in '99." "I said, "no, thank you."" "I said, "you guys don't even respect the cards."" "There was one particular, um, producer." "He called me one day, and he said," ""okay, look, we're gonna do it your way." ""And, uh, so what do you need?" "What do you do?"" "And he called me at my home, and I said," ""look, I don't know all of what you all do." "I'm gonna show you what I do."" "And then we did the show." "And it was a very different vibration." "And I remember that, uh, that young producer saying to me, he said, "you realize now..." "That your life is not ever going to be the same?"" "He said, "I'm telling you, this is amazing."" "And I said, "oh, bless your heart." "It's an infomercial star." "Thank you."" "He's like, "no, no, no." "Really." "Your life is getting ready to change."" "Well, I didn't hear that." "Arguing going on that I see by the 5-0... who asked you to go out of town, the stupid young one or the married one?" "Oh, the married one." "That's what me thought." "You know, at one point in time, it was real clear to me that the persona that they wanted to create was quite different from the person that was youree cleomili." "They wanted me to appear more what we would call "bush."" "I'll show you that the tarot can make a believer out of anyone." "There is a secret, baby." "You understand me?" "I actually had a higher-up tell me one time," ""well, don't tell them you went to an all-girl boarding school."" "Why not?" ""Well, we really don't want people, you know, to think that, you know..."" "what, that I'm educated?" "So they took a lot of time to hone what they thought everybody was loving." "Um..." "One producer thought I would scare the public." "So they really... no, they..." "it was very odd." "Often, they talked about me like I wasn't in the room, and that's when I also realized that I was more commodity and brand than a real person." "The character has to speak to you." "It has to be somebody..." "That you would enjoy being." "Because it shows in your voice if that's what you want to be." "'Cause, at a certain point, your real self is going to be older and less attractive to a certain... certain set of clients." "They're gonna go," ""well, but I only wanna talk to girls who are 20."" "Well, then, you need to talk to my character..." "Who's 20." "That's right." "Live dangerously." "Exactly." "So you start to take off your shirt." "And she comes over to you, and she helps you." "Slides her hands under the bottom of your shirt and around your back." "And helps you pull it off over your head." "I've never had a young voice, even when I was a teenager." "I've always been..." "Characters that are 28 to 40-ish." "Um... and they're more fun, anyway." "'Cause you can't explain how you have so much experience when you're 18." ""Oh, yeah, I know all about that."" ""Really?" "Do you?" "Okay."" "That's right." "Come on, baby." "Let me taste it." "I had some opera training." "Uh, I had a music teacher who was a..." "Amazing, amazing person." "Um, she taught me everything I know about vocal control." "And then she taught me a little bit about performance." "You know, how to be the different characters on stage." "You know, different music requires different... a different voice." "My voice tends to come across to people as very soothing." "Um, it's very calming." "I have a lot of people who call my characters just because they need to know that everything's okay." "And if I tell them that everything's okay, they just... they believe it." "So..." "Is that what you were looking for?" "Excellent." "Good-bye, sexy." "You can't play a character effectively that you're judging negatively." "You have to find a way to love them." "So then, in phone sex, I have to be able to..." "Commit to the given circumstances and go along for the ride without sounding like" "I'm completely disgusted and being turned off." "I mean, unless that's the guy's fetish, you know." "My favorite is Sarah." "Um, she is..." "She is everything that I am, except that..." "She's gorgeous." "Okay?" "She's a yugoslavian model that is just to die for." "Donna was my original character, and I still play Donna now." "Um, and..." "Donna is essentially just me..." "With a different name and different pictures and five years younger." "There's kristen." "She's my kinky redhead." ""Let's do that." "That'd be fun." "Oh, I'd love to do that."" "Shelby?" "Shelby was a Southern belle, and, um, she had huge double-z tits." "You know, the kind that her husband bought for her." "Then you have to figure out, if you're playing several characters on the same site, how to make each one just a little bit different." "Um, my voice takes on different tones, but I really don't have different voices." "But you're not going to know by listening to my voice clips that I'm the same person, because my word choices are completely different." "My, um... the rhythm to my speech is different." "And you look at the picture, and you go," ""oh, well, that can't be that other girl."" "What makes you tick?" "Whatever you need, whatever you want." "I know you've been a bad little boy." "If you want a fun-loving, adventurous playmate, look no further..." "I'm your girl." "I personally don't think that phone sex is necessarily about the orgasm as much as it is about human contact and people needing that sort of connection." "I connect to my callers by caring." "And I know that a lot of people would say," ""you shouldn't do that."" "We aren't subject to a lot of the traditional dangers that most people would associate with sex work." "Um, in a way, it's much more dangerous." "Because we work in..." "In the realm of the imagination." "So it's all in our head... it's all psychological and emotional." "The calls aren't all sexual." "A lot of them have a small amount of sexual element to them." "It is hard to get somebody to slow down and shut up and listen to you nowadays..." "it really is." "There's so much competition from everything." "We have 50 screens going all the time." "I... you know," "I'm just as guilty of it as anybody else." "It can be really, um..." "Gratifying in that, like," ""oh, all these guys think I am fuckin' hot." ""All these guys wanna have sex with me," ""and, you know, sneak away from their girlfriends and their wives and pay money to spend time with me."" "That can be really heady and really exciting." "And then, when you lose a caller..." "You can also take it really personally." ""Oh, he didn't just reject so-and-so," ""the phone sex operator." "He rejected me." "He doesn't want me anymore."" "Over the course of nine years," "I've made, well, you know, friends and had relationships develop that were totally unexpected." "One of my callers became a partner in real life." "Well, I think that's another misconception about phone sex is that, you know, your clients are just your clients, and, in fact, that it's somehow really important that operators, like, compartmentalize" "and don't get involved and stay very, you know, detached." "Um, which is just not who I am." "Because we're often the first person that's telling them it's okay to be who they are, we can become, in that caller's mind, you know, their best friend." "Or a perfect boyfriend, or a perfect girlfriend, or whatever it is that they may be hoping for." "It's challenging in that you have a snippet of a relationship with somebody, and then, when you hang up, it's over." "It can be kind of hard just feeling like," ""I got to know this thing," and then..." "You know, they're..." "they're kind of back out there in the ether or something." "I don't know what they're doing now." "There are those phone calls..." "I've probably had 50 of them... where I identified and connected with the person like, in 10 seconds, and that's another one of those senses we don't know yet." "But there was an immediate connection." "I knew them, you know, since they were born." "It's a weird way to put it, but I did." "I just knew these people." "And... and in my world, we thought, "oh, you know," "I must know you from another lifetime,"" "because the connection is instant." "Instantaneous." "The rule is, you never meet your clients." "That is the golden rule." "Never, ever meet your clients." "And then we all have exceptions." "It borders on the unethical, 'cause you're not supposed to build relationships with people." "But have I?" "Yeah, absolutely." "I have a client who I've had for a long, long time." "And..." "I took a chance, and I met him recently." "And we hit it off even better in person than we do on the phone, and that's saying a lot." "Um... so..." "Yeah, there are exceptions." "I had a caller who I talked to for many years, who I eventually met and became friends with, and became intimate with." "I considered him a friend." "Very clearly I thought of him as a friend more than a caller." "And through the whole time, he would continue to call me here and there." "Um, so I was in his town a couple years ago." "And I called him, I had his cell phone number." "I called him and I said, "hey, I'm in your town." "You know, let's go have coffee tomorrow."" "And he sounded very cagey, he was like," ""uh, I can't talk to you right now." ""Can you call me at my office tomorrow?" "It's this number." "Da-da-da-da."" "And I was like..." ""Okay..."" "So I call his office, and he's like," ""I can't talk to you anymore." ""Don't call my cell phone anymore." ""Don't email me anymore." "Don't I.M. Me." ""If you see me, I'm online, do not I.M. Me." "If you need to contact me, call me here at the office."" "And it turns out that he was in a... he was then in a relationship with somebody, um... who kind of had seen my website or something on his browser." "And it got weird, and he got caught, basically, like, uh, he got asked a question about who I was and didn't know how to answer it, so kind of said a lie and kind of did this," "and got caught in this weird thing..." "And..." "It really hurt..." "My feelings." "Because what I realized was like," ""I'm not your friend." ""You wouldn't treat a friend like this." ""You would be able to tell that person, 'she's my friend.'"" "you know?" "And so, like, it really... more... more than like anything... any situation" "I can remember with a client, it really hurt my feelings, 'cause it reminded me that..." "I was just..." "he was just a client." "¶¶" "I feel cities..." "At least New York City... it's one of the major cities I've lived in... it's tough to meet people." "I don't buy that you can really rub elbows, or it's on such a superficial level that you can't really get much out of it." "People in big cities are on guard." "I went through a tough breakup, I was isolated, lonely." "As I was walking, I'd go, you know," ""how can I meet people?" ""This is probably the most depressed" "I've ever been in my life."" "And I kept seeing like, "dog Walker," "house mover,"" ""we'll clean your house," whatever." "And I go, "I want to write a simple flyer."" "And the idea came into my head like right then," "I'm just gonna put, "if anyone wants to talk about anything,"" "my phone number, then "Jeff, one lonely guy."" "I thought, you know, I'd say I'm lonely so it's just stuck there." "People took photos of it and uploaded on the Internet, or this thing would have died that first couple of days." "I was on the phone for like 17 hours in one day, and for about nine hours straight I was plugged in in Starbucks, and everyone was watching me because it was so viral." "Every five seconds a new call would come in, so I had like eight people holding on the line." "I'm talking to this person, I'll call you back," "I'm jotting down numbers." "But it was like running ten marathons at Starbucks." "The daily routine now is, I get up in the morning and I go through voice mails that I got overnight, 'cause obviously I have to sleep." "And then I go into this voice mail log I have on my computer, and I call at least 20 people for the first couple hours of the day back." "And then, texting is another thing." "Some days I'll get 500 texts, so I spend another couple hours trying to respond to every text." "And I feel bad, because the texts I can't respond," "I'm gonna write their number and I'm gonna log it and say I'm gonna try and do it back." "But it comes to a point where you can only say" ""hi, how are you?" And these people are calling to have, you know, a texting relationship, and I can't, like, connect all the way because there are so many at times." "I mean, right now I have at least 700 people to call back." "And I mean, these are nice people, and their voice mails are endearing, and I... sometimes I just cannot get the motivation 'cause I'm so drained, and it's hard to call ever..." "I know that I have to do as much as I can." "I want to call all those people back, but after a while, it gets overwhelming." "I've probably broke down on ten calls and... once you break completely down and you're crying with another person, there's like nothing is off-limits." "So, I mean, those calls are just profound on what you can find in the basement of yourself and in them." "I mean, it's very revelatory, you know?" "My mother and I, we don't have the greatest relationship." "We just don't." "You know, we always butt heads since we were little." "I'm an Asian-American, you know, first generation, and in an Asian household it's really important that you keep, you know, like your... your presence perfect pretty much." "Like, my behavior lately has been super erratic, my eating, my fitness, my schooling, everything has been super like not me." "'Cause when I was younger, I was, um, I was raped." "And so, my whole life I was going through a ver... like, I was fine." "I was okay." "And then, um, the person kind of came back in to my life because this person is actually related to me." "I have told people in my family before, but the thing is that they don't really understand how... how to go through it." "And, I mean, I sat here in my room, and I couldn't feel anything." "Like all I could feel was my blood rushing through my body." "I put the number in my phone." "I kind of paused, and made sure that I can call this without being, you know... without having to be suicidal." "I'd rather talk to a complete stranger that understands and can follow each..." "you know, each part of my story, rather than just having to tell my family or friends that just give me pity." "One of the issues that's discussed by people who work at and operate hotlines throughout the world is what is an appropriate caller, and who are we there for?" "Uh, we believe that the people that are the greatest challenge to respond to are sometimes what other people are referring to as "inappropriate."" "I can take someone calling on the phone and calling me a faggot, you know?" "My answer will be, "thank you," and I'll hang up, you know?" "But, say that to a 13-year-old trans kid, you know, and that's gonna have a profound impact on them." "Well, if a caller is abusive, like a masturbator is masturbating on the phone, that's inappropriate." "Absolutely, they are not to take those calls." "I mean, they'll say" ""this is inappropriate for our line,"" "and they'll hang up the phone." "And for me, at that point, I put the phone down." "You want to heavy breathe and cost money, knock yourself out." "There you go." "Um, I do put my foot down, often, and say that there's things that I won't talk about." "And a lot of times, it has to do with something personal that's going on in my life at the time." "There aren't things I don't want to talk ab..." "I'm a very curious person." "I have been my whole life." "So, nothing that I won't talk about." "I mean, I want to try and learn about human nature, and heal myself, and if I can heal or help someone else along the way, great." "Jeff didn't want to talk about his breakup nearly as much as he wanted to talk about me and my life." "Um, he is taking on so much stress, and was taking on so much stress with all these people as well as the stress of the breakup, that when he would call me, he would talk to me" "about myself as an escape from that." "I probably have 20 to 30 people that I talk to on a regular basis, that I've met through... and, I mean, one of the first people I ever met is this wonderful woman named, um, Stephanie." "I came to New York City to visit Jeff." "I could say that I came here for a vacation, and I did include a vacation in visiting him, obviously, but the fact of the matter is, if he lived in Texas," "I'd be in Texas right now, 'cause I really did want to meet him in person and see if he was the same person as he is on the phone." "And, remarkably, he is." "I remember when you first called me," "I'd never heard anyone whose... half of their town had burned down." "What... wha... right." "That had just happened." "Were your parents displaced, or it didn't get their house?" "Or..." "I'm trying to understand that." "Um, it hadn't just happened." "It was probably about five months prior, maybe four months prior to phoning you." "Um, my parents..." "like, everybody got displaced, 'cause everybody was evacuated." "It was two weeks..." "a full two weeks... before anyone was even allowed back into the area." "There were scorch marks on the deck, and they got all the sheds in their yard, but it didn't get their house." "Mm, I'm gonna take this really... yeah, sure." "Hello?" "I worry about him immensely." "I probably worry about him more than he has any concept that I worry about him." "It's hard, I mean, I do have an attachment towards him." "I do care about him very much, and I can hear the strain in his voice." "I can see it on his face." "It's a lot to take on." "I've had very difficult calls, but there was a guy, um... oh, man, this one's hard." "Um... oh." "Um..." "I had a guy call me, you know, for like, uh..." "I mean, he called me like over and over for a while." "He was a nice guy, and then, uh..." "One day he called and said, "you know, I ca..." "I'm not gonna be able to talk to you anymore 'cause..."" "He said, "because I'm dying." And... and... just that he took his time when he was dying to talk to this guy who put this flyer up just... it absolutely killed me, you know, is that... you know, the last months on earth, and he's calling" "this guy who... posted a flyer with his phone number." "I mean, so, some of those calls are just... it shows you the great..." "greatness in humans, that they would call, um, on their deathbeds someone to try and help them, you know?" "It's the human spirit, so, I mean, there's been just amazing phone calls and emotion." "He worries about each and every one of these people, and he worries when he doesn't have the time to get back to them." "I mean, he wants to develop something and give something back to each and every one of these people." "And, you know, that's what?" "Like... tens of thousands of people?" "It's a..." "it's this enormous amount, so, it's a huge undertaking." "I may be getting to the point, you know, where it's not helpful you know, um, because I can't give myself anymore to people because I'm so overwhelmed, and I'm so, like, um..." "Overused, in a way, of like getting back to everyone that the responses may be not even strong anymore." "The only thing we can do on earth in a godless universe is to help other people, because it is a crazy human condition." "It makes no sense." "And if I can limit someone's suffering a little bit, then I did something before I evaporate into nothingness." "¶¶" "I can't imagine how they do it without kind of getting themselves in trouble?" "Day in, day out, hours on end." "Might be burning themselves out, secondary trauma, et cetera." "And I don't know if sometimes they feel the need to build a wall around them or what they're feeling..." "And not get too close." "Or, at least, not as close as we might... we might expect them to get, just to protect themselves." "Hello, this is the fire department." "What's the address of the emergency, sir?" "23." "And do you have anything there you can control the bleeding with, sir?" "Okay, we're coming as fast as we can." "I'm gonna stay on the phone with you, sir." "Wha... you're not gonna die, sir, okay?" "No, I want you to keep talking to me." "You're going to be fine." "Coming as fast as we can." "We don't get closure." "We can take a medical, and be performing cpr, and as soon as the ambulance gets there, we pick up the next call." "And we don't... we never know." "A lot of dispatchers fall into this thing where they don't want to tell people what they do for a living because what's the first question everybody always asks?" ""What's the worst call you've ever had?"" "And then what do you have to do?" "You have to relive it." "And it's... it's tough." "And if you don't talk about it with other people and say "hey, this could be a problem,"" "it is a situation." "Um, it is something to think about, that it could..." "Come back on you." "Currently, we are sitting within the Charlotte convention center in Charlotte, north Carolina, and this is the 2013 national nena conference and expo." "It's targeted towards us." "You know, there's classes that... it's stuff that we can learn from and build on, and networking." "What I like about being, you know, within the 911 community and being a 911 supervisor is that I get to help people." "I started this podcast, "within the trenches."" "I wanted people to be able to hear more dispatch stories and learn from what we do, and why we do the things that we do." "This is the opportunity of a lifetime, to start networking with everybody, to start talking to people." "I mean, I don't know if you saw me at the booth." "I am not afraid to talk to people." "I will go up and talk to them, and then kind of draw them into, "you're all part of this thing."" "When we see these big incidents occur... shootings, something blowing up, terrorist activity, whatever... our first thought is always," ""wow, I wonder what the dispatchers are going through?"" "Because we've all been there." "We're the first first responders." "We're there at the beginning of the call, and at the very end of the call." "And we're getting, you know, all the information for all the responders that are going out there." "That's where we fit into the whole scheme of things of emergency services." "How we say it, what we say, what we tell them to do." "I mean, we can save their life." "That fast." "¶¶" "How do I process some of the things that I've, you know, been hearing about?" "I don't know." "I mean, sometimes I do kind of carry things into my day and will be thinking about somebody." "Just..." "I just try to kind of be with that, and just accept that, you know, there's suffering in the world and that, you know, there only kind of so much we can all do, but..." "Even just being with someone in their suffering is doing something." "So, I think that that does provide me some comfort, just thinking that." "You've got to have some type of limit." "One, you got... you have to have a chance to breathe." "You got to have a chance to regroup." "You have to have a chance to get refreshed." "I mean, you need that." "I mean, sometimes you just got to shut this thing off and let your voice mail pick up things." "Well, one of the things I do to... come down is..." "The thing I did when I was a kid..." "I play pinball." "It beats snorting Xanax and downing shots of Jack Daniels, I guess." "What, did you have to work last night?" "Yeah, it... chaos, as usual." "Man, you go in the hospital and you think you're gonna have one, like, depressed guy, and you're gonna be in and out in 20 minutes, and..." "Then it turns into schizophrenics, and suicides, and hanging from the..." "Bedroom door by a extension cord, and..." "What, they do all that just 'cause they know you were coming?" "You know, sometimes I think they do, man." "I think that's the story of my life, so..." "But you know, man, that's how life goes... you fall into things..." "Life just happens." "There's this verse in the Bible, in the old testament." "It says, "I will give you the treasures of darkness, hidden riches in secret places."" "And I guess if I had a verse for crisis work, that would be it." "There's treasure in the darkness, but you gotta go there." "It's hard, but it's always rich." "Somebody had asked me the other day, what was the... you know, what's the scariest, um..." "Scariest thing I'd ever worked with in crisis." "The ones that were the scariest to me was the ones where I saw myself in that person." "The ones where I knew, if the circumstances were a little bit different," "I'd be on the other end of this phone." "I would be having these thoughts." "I would be having these struggles, you know." "When you identify with people on that level, it changes you." "And, hopefully, it makes you a little bit wiser." "So, yeah, you definitely..." "you learn from those." "They teach you." "Those people can teach you." "'Cause you see enough of yourself in them to where you know, that could be me." "The truth is, a lot of people get into the helping business because they're pretty messed up themselves, and they feel like, "if I can fix somebody else," ""it'll take the focus off of my own problems, or having to fix me."" "But, man, the hardest part to come to terms with in this... and a lot of people..." "That do what I do and come from where I've come from don't last in this business... and it's because they can't make peace with the fact that they are not in control." "Somebody calls me, and they want to take their life, there's nothing I can do to really stop them." "And I tell people that." "I say, "if this is really" ""what you want to do," ""there's nothing I can do to stop you." "That's your choice."" "And you have to respect that choice." "And I... and when you do that, though, it brings a dignity to it, I think." "¶¶" "There's an intimacy that, as a society, we are getting away from." "We are connected to people through text and video..." "But not necessarily spoken words." "Some of the Internet, it just creates anxiety, I feel, 'cause it's these fake walls, and I don't want to meet, you know, Jim or Sarah, and talk to them all the time on their Facebook updates." "It just seems to me phony, in a way." "You know, with the written word, there's... there's so much that's left out, there's so much like nuance and like subtlety that can't get communicated in an e-mail, or a text, or a chat." "In the 21st century, it's easy to get caught up in the behind-the-screen Facebook talking, and texting, and it's very impersonal." "I have had more misunderstandings with people via e-mail than I ever did talking to someone on the phone." "¶¶" "Do I feel that I helped people on the hotline?" "Did I enjoy laughing with people?" "Did I feel grateful for them to trust me enough to cry with them?" "Absolutely." "So, much of it was an amazing experience." "I remember the evenings, and I can see them now, working and doing what I did and being that other person on the other end of that line." "I don't know who I helped." "I don't." "Um, but people can say the right hello to you in the course of a day, and it can change your day." "So, I'm certain that I helped some people." "The psychic hotline had been in business for almost 10 years before I became spokesperson." "I signed a contract to come on and be videotaped, or taped, for an infomercial while I read cards." "In a very short period of time, it went to product and this and that, and my face and my name showing up places that I didn't know anything about." "The counsel that I had at the time didn't look at the contract close enough," "I don't think." "Neither he nor I took it that seriously." "Again, it was an infomercial." "From as much as I know and what I was informed of, the company was sued by the federal government... the fcc for unlawful business practices." "Many individual states sued the company as well." "In many states, though, you have the right to sue the spokesperson as well." "They dismissed all charges against me under one condition... that I not sue the state of Florida." "But still, to this day, what I've come to find out in the last 10 years and change since that happened is that people are gonna believe what they want to believe." "And I remember saying to my attorneys one day," "I said, "well, surely when the truth comes out it'll be all right,"" "and he looked... one of them... my lead counsel looked back at me and said," ""not really, sweetie." "That's not always the way it works."" "And I did not want to believe him." "I thought that I was a fairly savvy individual and that I was not running around with rose-colored glasses on, but I surely did believe that if the truth was there in black and white, that..." "I'm sorry." "Sit." "Sit." "Sit." "Go get the ball!" "Unh!" "Unh!" "Come on!" "Vroom!" "Go on, mami." "I still work on the phone." "So, I do a lot of my practice still via phone." "Oh, she's a mama's girl, I get it." "But, yeah." "I mean, that's pretty much it." "I'm at an age now where I've done all the things that I was supposed to do and hopefully put good karma out in the world, and so, I work every day to do that, you know?" "And to make sure I laugh every chance I get, you know?" "¶¶" "Samaritans in New York got clobbered by the budget cuts two years ago." "We had held a contract with the city of New York for 22 years that was terminated two years ago, so, in a period of ten days, we lost about 75% of our funding." "When we first opened, there were about 150 local hotlines lgbt related, and now, the last time we checked, there is about 50." "So, we've lost two-thirds of them, and the emphasis right now is on marriage rights and legal issues, and it kind of sucks the oxygen out of the room for other organizations." "Funding is difficult because with the economy going down, the foundation support dried up quite a bit." "Changing of the psych business and insurance cutoffs, they changed the nature of all the calls and the crisis calls and the..." "So, you do interact with people at a much..." "A much more intense level these days." "So, if we say even maybe 10 years ago, you would, you'd have people want to just call and talk to somebody for a while." "You don't have that much of that anymore, which is kind of sad 'cause those people kind of need a place for that, too." "I would assume that a number of the hotlines would be replaced by Internet-based forms of communication, so whether it be an online chat or some sort of voice-over I.P. System where you can in many ways maintain that anonymity," "that intimacy, as well as that distance at the same time, the Internet affords a number of those aspects." "I think a lot of people wonder," ""well, with the Internet, why are hotlines relevant?"" "And it's so much more about that person-to-person connection that you get when you're talking to someone." "You know, my best guess is that there will be a day when we don't call on telephones." "This is a word invented by Alexander Graham bell, right, meaning "distant voice."" "There will be a day when it doesn't make sense to call it a distant voice." "We'll have all these devices." "We'll develop a name for the devices." "They will fulfill the same basic function." "They'll keep us connected." "I think in the future our phones will just be answer, and you'll be able to talk anywhere you want." "You will never have a device." "That's what, you know, technology's making me think, 'cause I have so many calls or whatever." "I just want to be able to snap and talk to people." "You know?" "Like boom." "Look like a schizophrenic, but in 2100 it won't be schizophrenia." "There will just be phones everywhere." "I definitely believe that hotlines have a dynamic purpose in our society, and again, it's all about that energy connection, you know?" "I would prefer a conversation with somebody any day of the week over a text or an e-mail." "What I do keeps people from being lonely, and it gives people a sense of satisfaction and validation as a human being and lets them know that there's another human being out there who cares." "So what if they have to pay that person $3?" "You know?" "I think whether it's a sex line, psychic line, prayer line, suicide hotline, for the most reason, people call those things, they're looking for a connection." "It's like the old rabbi says... when a man goes to knock on a prostitute's door, he's really looking for God." "So, I think people are looking for connection wherever they're at, and it doesn't matter as long as you have people who are open to that connection." "Um, then, you know, there's a safe place for people to meet and to talk and to just give them a safe place to be real and be who they really are." "We don't have enough of that in the world, so that's why there will always be hotlines." "¶¶" "My wife and I, you could say we're complete opposites." "I was a hospital man in the air force, and she was a jet-engine mechanic." "When we were both in basic training, we hung out with friends and everything, and we were together." "We just got along great." "We had a..." "we had a one-year courtship." "In that period of time, I engaged to her, and then we got married in a military ceremony on the base." "She, uh, died of a sudden cardiac incident." "And, yes, I still miss her today as I did when she passed away." "¶¶" "Can I tell you something?" "It feels good to have somebody to talk to and understand what I am actually feeling." "¶¶"