Detroit Phone Stolen!
It finally happened! The Futel phone at Breckenridge Street in Detroit was stolen! Sound the alarm! Beat the drums!
Sorry, we want to get worked up about this, but we just can’t. Human beings are being abducted, disappeared, and murdered every day in this country by masked thugs hired by the Feds. A racist militia is swarming the nation and our genteel political rulers are clucking about how someone should really do something about this while they fund a genocide across the globe. And our phone got stolen, how sad.
Where were we? Oh, a contractor working for the city of Detroit ripped off our phone, sawing through the conduit and cutting off the bolts. We tracked them down to figure out how to get this situation taken care of and they got threatening. Our installation wasn’t up to code! But you don’t work for code enforcement! Well, you aren’t going to get any traction trying to get reimbursed for an installation that wasn’t up to code! OK, but there isn’t any installation that’s violating any code anymore, you took it! Oh yeah, well, you can talk to the person who hires us - if you want code inspectors swarming your block! With that last exchange we were finally able to learn that the next person to talk to was the city’s blight czarina, who was very helpful, even taking the time before our phone call to read up about us and butter us up. She assured us that our project is appreciated by the city and it was a mistake for a working phone to be removed. The situation is stupid because there isn’t a shortage of salvage in Detroit, and this is going to cost ten times as much to ship out and replace everything in a billable way, not to mention retrenching and reinstalling without the hobo labor we used the first time, but that’s how cities work.
This must have been an irresistible heist for the workers. There may not be any other working outdoor payphones in Detroit, and this one was only six blocks from their depot. All the payphones in Detroit have a concrete blob poured around the foot, so they can’t be removed without demolishing the pedestal and sidewalk. We use less severe methods, because who steals payphones anymore? It took eleven years to happen to one of ours! Also, notice all the empty space in the area. This is in the Core City neighborhood, which was once full of houses and apartments. Over the years most were abandoned, and many were destroyed by arson during Devil’s Night and other occasions. This led to a city push to demolish and remove the remaining unused structures. This crew clears the payphones. Hey, they do their job well, taking only 11 minutes to yank ours in the winter, but hands off of Futel! Tuebor!
So the Detroit phone is down for a while, but on the bright side, it’s an amusing diversion. The phone will be back. In the meantime, please keep resisting as much as your morals require and safety allows. These are bad times but it’s not over yet.
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