2016 Voicemails

By popular demand, we’re releasing the full set of voicemails we received in 2016. Most of them are hangups, have fun sorting through them:

#Octothorpe 2016 Voicemails

If you do something cool with them, please show us! Tweet us, post on our facebook, or email them to phone@octothorpe.club

2017 Update

We had a wonderful time in 2016, and in 2017 we’re planning on being there again! We’ll bring the phone, as usual, and possibly a few other projects. We’re also adding a few new faces this year, and look forward to seeing what they bring to the playa. We’ll post updates here and to our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Our phone this year

As you may be aware, we brought a faux-rotary analog telephone to the 2016 burn and placed it on a stool by the road outside our camp. Approximately 2 weeks prior to the burn one of our telephonically-inclined camp members decided to try this project on a whim, not really expecting anything to come of it. There have been other phones on playa for years, we just wanted to have our own.

It was setup just like any standard phone line on this camp member’s phone system, with call waiting, voicemail, etc. He set it up Monday morning. Later in the morning another camp member posted the number on /r/burningman and two Burning Man related Facebook groups. And the phone began to ring. And ring. And ring.

We answered some calls but mostly called passersby over to answer calls. The first few days, the calls came in so fast that we would pick up one and immediately hear the call waiting tone of another call coming in. We left camp for the evening on Monday night, and came back to find a group of people gathered around it, answering calls and excitedly talking to random people from all over the world. We went to bed and woke up the next morning to find it still ringing.

We made improvements throughout the week, such disabling call waiting and adding some chairs to the front of our camp for people to sit in and take calls. We wrote the phone number on a whiteboard, and a few other bits encouraging other participants to take calls, or if it wasn’t ringing to call their mothers.

We’ve been asked about call count and such, so here are some quick numbers we pulled from the PBX. A more detailed analysis may follow:

Total Inbound Calls: 14682

Total Inbound Call Time: 6:44:06

Total Outbound Calls: 324

Total Outbound Call Time: 9:03:08

Total Voicemails left: 439

We’ll be going through the voicemails, removing the empty ones, censoring any personal information that may have been left, and posting the rest. We are already working on improvements for next year. If you want to get in touch with us, find us on Twitter or Facebook, or email hashtag@octothorpe.club.

#NewAddress

Our setup team arrived this morning and found out that we are actually a block down from where we were told. So, our new address is 5:15 and Carny!

#Packing

Our setup team is leaving for the playa tomorrow, we’re just finishing up our last few things they need. They’re hoping to hit the playa around midnight Thursday (technically Friday morning), stay the night then coordinate with placement and start setting up in the morning. The rest of us will be there at 10am on Sunday. We’ll attempt to post updates as we get them. See you on playa!

#PhotoboothBeta

We’re going to have the #photobooth constructed and running at the Seattle Burners Newbie Picnic, where we will be #betatesting it. If you’d like to try it out come on down to Woodland Park on the afternoon of August 2nd.

#omg #Placement

Placement emailed us today to let us know that we have been placed at 4:45 and Carny. We are obviously extremely #stoked about this.

As our plans solidify, we are getting a clearer picture of how our camp will look. We gave up on building a vehicle, but most of our other plans are still in place. Swamp coolers are nearly done, and we’re planning to evaluate the structural integrity of one of the hexayurts, which is believed to have issues, and possible rebuild or replace it.

#BigPlans

Since we got our tickets last Wednesday, there’s been lots of discussion of how to organize the camp. For lodging, we were considering a 30 foot geodesic dome we found on craigslist, or constructing a sort of a platform inside our largest hexayurt to make a second level, thus holding twice the number of people.

On top of that, we found a potential base for a mutant vehicle. The discussion is ongoing, but at the current rate we’ll have a vehicle on playa this year.

#Hi

We’re camp #octothorpe. 2015 will be our first year as a camp.