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SPEAKER_05: Oops, that's my phone. Sorry. I just dismissed that.
SPEAKER_02: Producer James T. Green.
SPEAKER_05: Sorry, honestly, it's just rare that I even keep my phone on vibrate or anything other than silent. It's kind of rare that I get calls at all.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because millennials are killing phone calls.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, well, kind of, but I can still remember a time Rich put phone calls. Like specifically when I was younger, probably around 15 years old. I remember family parties at my great grandmother's house. The smells were that of pound cake and baked macaroni and cheese. The sounds were gossip and complaints and bravado, but there's one noise that was constant and it came from my uncle Scooter or rather from his phone.
SPEAKER_01: See, family functions in my mother's house back then. Everybody left their cell phones on even before they blessed the food.
SPEAKER_05: See, Scooter was the definition of a cool uncle. I remember him wearing a lot of white, even though our meals were pretty messy. He was a sunglasses indoors kind of guy sitting at the head of the table as he leaned back. The sunlight through the screen door would shine on his link bracelet and his flip phone was always clipped to his belt because Scooter got a lot of calls. It may have been rude to me, but I wanted to hear my phone.
SPEAKER_01: I wanted it to ring.
SPEAKER_05: Scooter was always getting up from the table to go to the corner of the room and whisper on the phone or step out on the porch. Sometimes he'd take the call right there in front of everyone. And we all remember the song his phone would play. It seared into my brain.
SPEAKER_01: My ringtone is this woman's work by Maxwell.
SPEAKER_05: Uncle Scooter had a lot of girlfriends. And so his phone, a hollow mono speaker blasting Maxwell's smooth neo soul sound rang all the time. It never went beyond the first few seconds. So you just hear the before he flips open his clamshell phone.
SPEAKER_01: The song starts out, you know, he starts to scream, you know, so when this ringtone goes off around people, it grabs their attention, especially by me being a single man. It caught a lot of girls eyes and their ears too.
SPEAKER_05: And this is the time when everyone had ringtones. When the song your phone played really said something about you.
SPEAKER_02: I never had a ringtone myself. Maybe for the same reason I never got a tattoo. I never wanted to commit to something so personal and so public.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, ringtones were really meaningful and they could be different for all of your friends. I remember I'd scroll to like my 15 contacts, figuring out what was the best ringtone to sign for folks in my phone. Like what song would play when my best friend calls. Or my mom. And my crush.
SPEAKER_02: That's a whole lot of Usher.
SPEAKER_05: I mean like who wasn't listening to Usher at that time? But it wasn't just Usher. You could go vintage with a timeless track or you could grab a new single and change it up with the newest hottest song. These little 15 second melodies were these disposable yet highly personal trinkets. And it was all thanks to this guy.
SPEAKER_08: My name is Veskou Mátypálányan, but everybody calls me Veskou.
SPEAKER_05: Veskou is the father of the custom ringtone, which was conceived at a party in Finland in 1997.
SPEAKER_08: At that time I was 27 years old and I was living downtown Helsinki and Wednesday was really the night to go out, hang around with your friends and it was a gloomy November
SPEAKER_05: evening. Finland was in the midst of its Nokia inspired tech boom and a lot of Veskou's drinking buddies worked in tech.
SPEAKER_08: And during these discussions everybody was having their phones with them, what is the coolest phone, and showing the new stuff that you can do with that.
SPEAKER_05: You were like sitting around the table showing off. Showing off, of course, of course.
SPEAKER_08: Hey, what's the latest thing? Have you seen this that you can really do that kind of thing? We were nerds, to be honest, we were nerds.
SPEAKER_05: But they were nerds that knew how to party. So we were drunk.
SPEAKER_08: But the party wasn't really the thing. The whole inspirational lightning came the day after, next morning, when you're in this kind of very, a bit fragile mood.
SPEAKER_05: In other words, Veskou woke up hungover.
SPEAKER_08: And you have to find a way to survive the coming day. Gloomy morning, windy, really windy morning. I was walking from my home to the office, that's about two miles. It was cold and dark and my phone rang and it was this Nokia tune.
SPEAKER_05: Veskou was just barely hanging on. The last thing he needed was this annoying sound going off.
SPEAKER_08: And then I decided now is enough. We got to do something with this thing.
SPEAKER_05: If Veskou's phone was going to ring, it was going to make the sounds he wanted on his terms.
SPEAKER_08: I really wanted to hear Van Halen's jump.
SPEAKER_05: Or at least the Nokia cell phone version of Van Halen's jump.
SPEAKER_08: It's a power song. It would have been so much better to hear the... All that stuff. It's a positive song for me. And Eddie Van Halen, he's a legend with his guitar.
SPEAKER_02: So Veskou got to work trying to get Eddie Van Halen into his cell phone. The Nokia phones Veskou and his friends were using had this early text messaging function called smart messaging that let Nokia users send messages to each other.
SPEAKER_05: Veskou and his squad realized that they could compose ringtones in a program Veskou created called Harmonium and then use that smart messaging platform to transfer bits of song as code to a cell phone.
SPEAKER_08: Let's put it this way that the guys that I was working with, they were capable of doing all kinds of cracking and hacking.
SPEAKER_05: Veskou started fooling around on Harmonium and came up with the stripped down monophonic version of his favorite pump up jam. Veskou loaded the ringtone on his phone and he really wanted someone to give him a call when he was out in public. And his big moment came on the way to a meeting on a packed rush hour train. Someone called his phone and jumped screamed from his pocket. Everyone in the train was staring at him and he loved it.
SPEAKER_02: The custom ringtone was born. But not everyone was going to be able to hack their flip phone the way that Veskou and his friends did. So he decided that he wanted to find a way to make custom ringtones easily accessible to the masses.
SPEAKER_08: Now we know that we can do that and we have to spread the gospel. We have to provide this opportunity to everyone and provide some kind of a service or application for anybody to be able to customize their ringtone.
SPEAKER_05: Veskou wanted everyone to be able to hear exactly the melody they wanted so they could show off their phones and be the coolest nerd at the nerd party. And so he started pitching telephone companies on the idea of an application that would allow people to create, share, and download custom ringtones. And then one day this Finnish wireless provider called Radio Linja said yes. They took Veskou's idea and scaled it up. The whole thing, the phenomenon started to spread.
SPEAKER_08: It's like a meme. You are in a bus or train commuting or whatever and you hear a custom ringtone. And your first idea is that that's not the Nokia ringtone. Where the guy got it.
SPEAKER_05: Veskou's software allowed anyone with time on their hands to make their own musical ringtone creations. But most people didn't have time on their hands.
SPEAKER_08: I would say that 99.9% of the people just want to have the ringtone in their phone.
SPEAKER_02: Which meant they needed a massive library of everyone's favorite songs in ringtone form. And to build that library, they needed ringtone composers.
SPEAKER_05: Composers like Mike Levine.
SPEAKER_11: One thing that would take a lot of my time during the day was to think how do I boil down a song with a lot of voices down to just one simple melody line.
SPEAKER_05: Mike worked for a ringtone company called Zingy while he was studying technology at NYU. He found the job listing on Craigslist. And he says that being a ringtone composer was kind of like being a translator. Each tune was a little puzzle.
SPEAKER_11: This is something you have to think of like if you're doing a song Hey Ya by OutKast. You'd have to think of just that melody line.
SPEAKER_10: And do it in such a way where it would still communicate what the song was to folks.
SPEAKER_02: By 2004, Zingy was one of the biggest ringtone producers in the world. The company says it was selling 2.5 million ringtones a month. And these were basic monophonic ringtones. Simple bleeps and bloops. Like this. Getting cell phones around the world to play a super stripped down version of Final Countdown might not seem that impressive today. But at the time, it required a huge amount of work. Especially because each different brand of phone required its own custom sound file.
SPEAKER_05: And so Mike and the composer Zingy had to program different ringtones for each phone
SPEAKER_11: manufacturer. And so we would have to create the same monophonic ringtone like 20 different times. It was enormously tedious. We had a whole bank of phones that we would use for testing these too. And all these were like bricks, like huge phones.
SPEAKER_02: But phones eventually got smaller and cheaper. And the business model began to change. Phone companies started giving away phones for very little money with the idea that they would make their profits on the contract and other services like ringtones.
SPEAKER_05: And that created a demand for better, more musically complex ringtones.
SPEAKER_11: Polyphonic ringtones started entering the market. And it was like, hallelujah, we can create four different channels of audio. Amazing. And I was so just overjoyed to be able to create like actual kick drums and snare drums.
SPEAKER_02: Polyphonic ringtones meant that instead of one note at a time, you could get four notes at one time.
SPEAKER_05: And so the classic Nokia ringtone came alive in a blaze of polyphonic glory. With polyphonic ringtones, composers were able to move beyond code. And they didn't have to completely reprogram the song for every phone manufacturer. Now they can actually start using keyboards to map out their creations.
SPEAKER_11: If you're doing a rock and roll track, you have to decide how many of those four tracks you're going to give to the drums, how many you're going to give to, let's say a guitar or bass line, and how many you're going to give to the voice.
SPEAKER_05: This was the golden age of the ringtone, when composers like Mike Levine were cranking out their greatest works of ringtone art. Mike was actually responsible for one of my favorite ringtones ever. Back in high school, I was a huge Kanye West fan. I grew up outside of Chicago around the time that Kanye and ringtones were both blowing up. Kanye's second album, Late Registration, had recently been released. Aside from the big singles like Gold Digger and Heard Him Say, my absolute favorite song was a small cut towards the end of the album, track number 17. It's a slow moving track with a dense orchestral build, almost like the falling action of the album. The song is called Celebration. I love the production of this track. I felt like I was on screen starring in a movie of my life whenever I listened to it. It gave me confidence. Kanye's Celebration was like the perfect musical representation of myself, which made it the perfect ringtone. You know what time it is.
SPEAKER_11: It's a celebration, bitches. So I couldn't not end that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: No, I'm highly certain that your version was probably the one I downloaded. Stop it. No way. Yeah. I'm pretty sure your work was the soundtrack of my late high school years.
SPEAKER_11: This is amazing, James.
SPEAKER_10: That's probably the coolest thing I can imagine.
SPEAKER_11: Oh my God. I love it. I love it. Oh, fan of my work here.
SPEAKER_02: In a short period of time, ringtones became a booming business. But using all these popular songs meant companies like Zingy needed to get the rights to them.
SPEAKER_04: So a lot of my recollection of my time there was working in a very fast pace, like, we need to be the first to get this out. Let's do it. Let's figure out who has the rights. Let's go get them.
SPEAKER_05: That's Stacey Ibrhage. She handled the licensing over at Zingy. There was a content team that identified all the hot songs that were coming out. They gave folks like Stacey a heads up. And then she went into action. Say, hey, this new song is going to drop by X artists.
SPEAKER_04: And we need to make sure that we have the ringtone rights the day the song drops. And so oftentimes our job was feverishly trying within the space of hours to figure out which publishers and labels own rights to certain songs. How did we get those rights?
SPEAKER_02: All these forces, the licensing, tech, and the business came together to usher in the final fully evolved form of the ringtone, the real tone.
SPEAKER_05: Real tones were basically just snippets of the song cut down to size, like Uncle Scooter's ringtone. It was just that Maxwell song. It was the closest thing to listening to music on our phones in the mid 2000s. And as cool as it was to finally hear music on your phone in high fidelity, for composers like Mike, it was hard not to see the rise of the real tone as something of a loss.
SPEAKER_11: Once we got the rights to the actual songs, and once the technology got savvy enough, we became much more editors at that point than anything else. We missed getting to actually get into the nitty gritty and create the audio ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: And that bleepy, bloopy ringtone aesthetic was gone forever. And the real tones were just music now, even the classic Nokia ringtone.
SPEAKER_05: And once you can put any sound on a phone, why limit yourself to music?
SPEAKER_11: Our largest market were like younger, mostly boys based on a lot of like polling data that we had. And so I created ringtones called burping cow, farting donkey.
SPEAKER_11: That's some classy stuff. I used to bring home just myself like three, four K a month just selling this stuff. You know, I joke around. That's the opposite of Edison's formula. This is like 99% inspiration, 1% perspiration. Cause these take like a matter of minutes to create, you know, I would just find like samples of a donkey and like farting noises. I know it's about as dumb as it sounds.
SPEAKER_02: With millions of cell phone users buying real tone, pop songs and donkey farts, ringtones became a cash cow and not just for the cell phone companies, also for the music industry, which was struggling in the early two thousands.
SPEAKER_09: The early two thousands was the rise of file sharing, both of, you know, legal and illegal kinds. And this helped to cause a major decrease in music recording industry revenue. And so the ringtone was seen as a way of kind of making up for that.
SPEAKER_05: This is Samanta Gopintath. He's a professor of music theory and he wrote a whole book about the ringtone industry. Gopintath says that realtones became an increasingly valuable piece of intellectual property for music publishing companies.
SPEAKER_09: Who owns a song is the publishing company. And so it's the publishing company that gives you permission to, you know, kind of essentially use the material of the song.
SPEAKER_05: The realtones, which were actual snippets of the songs, allowed the music industry to have more control. So they were able to charge a higher price and get a bigger cut.
SPEAKER_02: The realtone may have helped the music companies, but it ended up being the beginning of the end for the ringtone industry.
SPEAKER_05: The custom ringtone met its demise, according to Samanta, for a few reasons. As smartphones improved, people just started using their own MP3s as ringtones. It became much easier to just copy them and get them on your phone.
SPEAKER_09: Also, scammers got into the ringtone business and started scaring off the customers.
SPEAKER_05: But the biggest reason was that it just became too much. If everyone had their own cell phone with their own little cute ringtone, public spaces got really noisy.
SPEAKER_02: And so everyone just started putting their phones on vibrate.
SPEAKER_09: There is a kind of social policing that's really also taken place to reduce sort of public phone communication practices, and the ringtones decline is a part of that.
SPEAKER_05: Phones became more functional. Texting got better and faster and more convenient. Our phones became full-on pocket computers and entertainment devices with headphones.
SPEAKER_09: People are using their phones as part of creating kind of private auditory bubbles for themselves.
SPEAKER_05: And this spelled the end for ringtone companies like Zingy and ringtone makers like Mike.
SPEAKER_11: I'll be honest, by like mid-07, it became an almost daily expectation. We'd be like, we knew, you know, this axe was going to fall anytime. We just didn't know when it was going to come. And everybody was just thinking, we're all making good money here. Let's just enjoy it while it lasts.
SPEAKER_05: Unfortunately for Mike, the axe fell just as swiftly as he feared.
SPEAKER_11: I believe it was September or October of 07, it happened. And our new CEO at that time came around and basically fired our whole content group. It was about 35 to 40 people let go at once.
SPEAKER_02: The day the music died. Yeah, it was not a happy day.
SPEAKER_02: Over a decade later, our phones are touch-screened mini-computers that never leave our sides. They are our music players, our televisions, our portal to the world. And in a way, it all kind of started with Vescu and his need to have Van Halen on his flip phone.
SPEAKER_08: We proved that there is such thing as a mobile entertainment. There's a business there and it will change the whole world.
SPEAKER_05: Vescu remembers his little place in history every time his phone rings. Let me see, it's switched my phone on here.
SPEAKER_05: It's not a polyphonic ringtone, it's just an MP3 file that plays when Vescu gets a call. But it's still something he holds onto as a form of self-expression.
SPEAKER_08: I think it's been there at least 15 years. I'm a kite surfer myself, so for me surfing USA is also a statement that I'm a surfer.
SPEAKER_05: And Vescu isn't the only one still using custom rings. Mike, the former ringtone maker, is now a student of musicology at the University of North Carolina. And his ringtone screams student of musicology who still thinks about ringtones.
SPEAKER_11: I have been using Radiohead's Idiotak actually for a while, which I think makes a really good ringtone.
SPEAKER_05: And don't forget about my uncle Scooter. His ringtone 16 years later is still that Maxwell song.
SPEAKER_01: In my day when you got something, you held onto it because it was hard to come by. So when you got something, you learned to take care of it and treasure that. And I guess it carried over into my adulthood, especially with something that you like. I love this ringtone and I held onto it for dear life and I'll probably have this ringtone until I die.
SPEAKER_05: I may not have a Maxwell ringtone on my deathbed, but after reporting this story, I decided I'm not going to keep my phone on silent anymore. I'm using ringtones again and I think a lot about which ringtone to use on a given day. My default is one of my favorite Yeah Yeah Yeah songs, one that represented a pivotal moment of my life and it brings me joy every time a telemarketer calls. If I travel, I'll switch it up to match wherever I'm going. Kind of like how someone reads a book about the place that they're visiting. If I'm in the DC area, I may switch up my ringtone to a Goldlink song. The week that NPR's morning edition changed their theme song, R.I.P., I made my ringtone the original theme. I think of ringtones kind of like enamel pins or tote bags or baseball caps. They're a simple way for me to show off my tastes in an increasingly templatized world. So, a modest suggestion here for the next time you go out in public. Take your phone off vibrate. Load up your favorite song, something that says something about you. Turn the volume up and wait for a robot scammer to call.
SPEAKER_02: The horrible things that happened when we hit peak ringtone in the 2000s. After this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out, remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Visit article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_02: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So Jo Rosenberg, word on the street is that you have a ringtone story.
SPEAKER_07: I do. I do. I have a ringtone story. And it's not, it's not about my ringtone, I should just say that straight off. And it takes place, it takes place in this golden era of ringtones. It's circa 2004. I'm a senior in college. And it takes place in, you know how like every college has that kind of student lounge area where there's just like a bunch of sofa chairs and the heat is turned up like five degrees warmer than everywhere else because like, like the the nominal excuse is that you're there to study but really you're there to sleep. And there's just all these kind of just sleepy undergrads kind of dozing off in the oversized chairs. Totally. Right. And like the golden rule of one of these places, of course, is like silence. It's like the one place besides I guess the library where you know silence rules. And so anyways, I went in there to like study slash sleep. And I found a sofa near the roaring fireplace. And I start to kind of, you know, I sit down, I'm starting to kind of doze off. And but just before I kind of actually fall asleep in earnest, I hear this tinny recording of a voice similar to the voice of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless. And it's going, excuse me, your phone, it's ringing. And I'm like, what is that? Right. And I look around and there is a cell phone on the coffee table directly in front of me completely unattended. It's ringing and this is its ringtone is this voice and then it continues and it's like, excuse me, I still don't know why you're not picking up the phone because it's really annoying.
SPEAKER_02: And this is the phone. This is the ringtone of the phone. This isn't someone talking to you next to you telling you to pick up the phone.
SPEAKER_07: No, precisely. This is the phone itself. This is the real tone recording coming from the little tinny speaker of the phone, projecting itself towards me, urging me, a total stranger to pick it up. And there's no one attending to the phone. I'm the only person near it. And it's really loud. And so everyone in this commons area is starting to look and turn towards me. And now the phone is like, excuse me, I think you really need to pick up that phone because it's ringing. And everyone's looking at me, the person next to the phone, and kind of giving me these desk stairs like, yeah, buddy, the phone is ringing. Why aren't you picking it up? And I don't know what to do because it's not my phone. And I don't know how to communicate this. And I'm trying to be like, I'm sorry, it's not my, I'm just kind of like, but meanwhile, the phone's ring is getting more and more irritated with me. I don't understand why you are not picking up the phone because it's really annoying and it's still ringing. And at this point, people are coughing, you know, doing coughs. And I am just getting like red in the face because I don't know what to do. And I'm like, I'm sorry, guys, I just, but it's not my, and then finally, the phone reaches this fever pitch where it's just like, why don't you just pick up the phone already because it has been ringing off the hook nonstop. And this point, I'm just wondering, how many rings has it been set to? Has this person set it to go to voicemail after like 12 rings? But so anyways, finally, I'm like, fine, fine, fine, I'll pick up the phone. And I pick it up, right? And I can see that you can like reject the call, right? And I pick it up, I reject the call. And I'm like, okay, great. I did it. You know, it's fine. Stop ringing the phone. And just right after I do that, I hear this voice behind me say, excuse me, what are you doing? And I turn around, I look behind me and I see this young woman who is just looking at me utterly perplexed. And she's like, why are you holding my phone?
SPEAKER_07: And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, I had to reject the call. And she's like, you did what? It's like, well, it was ringing. I had to reject. She's like, you picked up my phone and decided to reject my call. Why would you do that? Why would you ever pick up someone else's phone? It's an incredible violation of privacy. Right? And now like, everyone's watching us. And I'm just I don't know what to say because I don't know. Because the situation is already so like, strangely complicated to explain how I got to the rationale by which I would feel justified in picking up her phone, turning it off, which she just doesn't understand at all because she just wasn't there. Right. Right. And so I'm just like stumbling all over myself. And she just continues to break me about like, how like incredibly presumptuous this has been a violation of privacy. How could I ever do such a thing? And so finally, I'm I just got like, you know, I'm so I'm so sorry, I'm just gonna leave. Right. And I like put the foot, I put the phone down and just like, kind of like embarrassingly walk slash scurry away. And like, in a way that like, if I were Hugh Grant, it would be charming, but I'm not. So it's actually just utterly, like awkward and humiliating. Do you know what I mean? Totally. Um, I still remember the scene more vividly, and remember it more frequently than any other kind of comparable scene of embarrassment. Like in my entire life. So why do you think that is? So I thought about this a lot, actually. And I think it has to do with this concept. Are you familiar with this term? It's a German term called I'm going to mispronounce it but trepon bits. No. So trepon bits kind of mean stair with sometimes it's called stair jokes, stair words. And it's the idea of you've been humiliated somehow in public, you've lost an argument. And like six hours later, as you're walking up some set of stairs, like the perfect comeback occurs to you. Oh, so Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_02: I see stair with so like the wit that you come up with while walking up stairs, right away from the scene. Yeah, I got it. And you kind of stop and pause and you're like, oh, only I had said this.
SPEAKER_07: And of course, every time we do this, we always spend like the next five minutes, like kind of honing this comeback and like, workshopping it, saying it out loud, giving ourselves a little performance. And then until we've really, really just have the perfect comeback, and we can pat ourselves on the back. And, you know, on some level, when we do this, we can poke fun at it and say that it's kind of petty of us and kind of silly and we're just stroking our fragile egos. But I actually think this, this idea of Treppenvitz, this idea of like coming up with the comeback later actually does serve a kind of healthy psychological purpose, which is it allows you to get over this thing, right? It allows you to kind of put it behind you and put in its place and walk away kind of with your ego healthily intact. And I think one of the reasons I've never forgotten this scene and why every time I think about it, and I think about it way too often, it just continues to irk me in this way that is disproportionate to its actual importance is because I've never thought of the perfect comeback. It's such a complicated... I totally know what you mean.
SPEAKER_07: It's such a complicated situation with so many layers that would require so much explanation to actually like get the person up to speed to explain to her the context and the exposition and everything such that she would understand the situation such that I would be able to then deliver the comeback that it's almost like uncombackable. And I just... and so, and so it's actually, I've never been able to kind of purge it. It's, it's, and it's haunted me to this day. But I will say there's something else about this incident that didn't occur to me until we started working on this story, which is that this was something that could only happened at this moment in history circa 2004. So obviously, this is a real tone, right? It's a real tone. It's a recording of a woman's voice. It's not polyphonic. It's not monophonic. And it's much more the donkeys farting category of things than it is in the music category of things. But what it is is that I'm kind of stuck at this moment where two historical forces, one being like an unstoppable force and the other being an immovable object are about to collide. And one of these forces is you definitely need your own custom ringtone. And the other force is everyone else's custom ringtone is really annoying. And everyone just needs to turn them off. Right? Totally. And this was happening right around this time, 2003 to 2005. And I got caught in the middle in between these two forces colliding because with this ringtone that is addressing this very issue, it is like the ultimate meta self reflexive, scary movie five, you know, this trend is over. All we can do is point to the form itself and declare ourselves superior to it. And so basically, this ringtone is saying like, aren't ringtones annoying? Right? And in fact, yes, they are. And at least in the case of this one. And so this is something that, you know, could only have happened to me in this incredibly narrow window of time, right? When this kind of Hegelian dialectic of ringtones and no ringtones, you know, thesis, antithesis collides and created something, something new in its wake. All right, that's all that's all I got.
SPEAKER_02: So if one of the problems with this story is that you've never come up with the perfect comeback, the perfect Schuppenwitz to ease your mind to assuage this sort of lingering mortification, maybe we should figure one out for you. You know, like, I don't know if I don't think I can do it. But the collective mind power of the people who listen to this show, maybe they could come up with a good comeback for you. So if you were in this situation and you were being browbeaten by somebody who didn't want you to answer their phone, even though their phone was ringing and unaccompanied in front of you, what should you say back?
SPEAKER_03: Okay, we'll see what we can do. That's great. 99% Invisible was produced this week by James T. Green, edited by Avery Truffleman and Emmett
SPEAKER_02: Fitzgerald, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kirk Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team is Joe Rosenberg, Delaney Hall, Chris Berube, Vivian Lee, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet trappin' vids at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org, run on Instagram, and Reddit too. But you can download a set of original music composed for this episode by Sean Real and use it as your personal ringtone at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_03: Radio-Topia from PRX.
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