Endurance Piece

I Paul Igoe will be attempting to call as many people as I can out of a phone book from 8 til 11 am Thursday the 21st. I will call and when someone answers I will greet myself and then begin a conversation asking the person if they have anything interesting to tell me. I am not sure the results or treactions but I am hoping to overcome my bad habbit of not communicating through the phone. My goal is to learn something new about many people hear interesting stories and explore the idea of simple conversation with a complete stranger. The location will be wherever I can get a local connection to a landline. Since the calls will be local I am hoping to hear some stories of facts about the Alfred area.


Reaction:

Today went well as I called my many locals of the area. A lot of the things I took away from the project were a lot more meaningful than I expected. One Problem though is that I had nobody veiwing my peice because I did not put a label on the blog. The ones who were around to spectate though always got a laugh or gave me positive reasurance. My goal of calling people on a landline was cancelled after I found that the phones in Cohen are for Emergency earlier which was not so bad because I had my cell phone so I ended just using that.
At first I just would chose names randomly. Then I noticed that many of the middle aged people that I seemed to be calling were getting angry for a call at 8 AM, so I figured that many people that wake up early are older people. My entire focus changed when I did this because I would search for names that older people would have. To my surprise this nameing steriotype actually worked more older people were answering than younger and would talk for longer. The Script that I recited every rare answer was:
Hello this is Paul Igoe and I am currently a student her at Alfred University, and I was just calling to ask how you were doing today....... I was wondering if you had an interesting fact relating to anything at all?

Most of the time this entrance would save me from people who just thought I was a telemarketer right off. Many people were friendly but seemed confused. They were releived that the conversation was quick and breif.
I thought this was a good thing Until I had gotten in touch with Alberta B. who was a women who seemed reluctant that I had calle dlike she was waiting for me. She told me about her life and started by saying, "we dont do much here" and as I looked further into this I had realized the we was her beloved dog and her nine cats. When I realized this I felt bad and began to have a conversation with her. I felt I had left her to fast afterwards so I said that the next lonely person I would talk to for longer.
Then came a similar case wih Shirley B. who was very friendly and explained her life as a young teen, She told me that when she was 16 she was surrounded by women because of the war, she told me that no men were around so her and all her friends would go down to the post office and mail letters and eagerly wait for the reply. She also explained how some people just did not come back and there was no real answer to what happened. She started to relate the reluctance for the communication today and desribes her favorite image being those commercials of veterans coming home to their family in todays war.
In total I made about 120 calls and out of those 120 about 30 had answered the phone. I found this very nerve racking because I did not know if someone was going to answer and or what they would be like, many of the other people that I had talked to had all sorts of interesting things to say relating to the economy, government, or just current event such as volcanoes or oil spills which were all new to me.
Another women that I had called was a wife of the man I was calling her name Penny, she was very happy to share that her grandson age ten won a trip to Maryland and they were leaving tommorow for the exiting national wrestleing event.
I could only want to talk to all of them as their stories made me more knolegeable of people in the area and at the time of day. This nervious feeling I had at first quickly went away when I talked to the crowds of strangers.
The fact that it took three hours did not change anything except that i was reluctant for it to be over but in reality it was not really that bad of a task and enjoyed taling to strangers.