Token Sucking

January 24, 2015 11:30 AM

The Kiss of Desperation: A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token/A Lewis Grizzard take on the subject from 1991
posted by josher71 (39 comments total)

Welp, there goes my pitch for TkNSk.
posted by oceanjesse at 11:39 AM on January 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

> some of the most dedicated were able to extract more than $50 worth of tokens a day.

"...and those who lived longer than two months were found to have boosted their immune systems to superhuman levels."
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:42 AM on January 24, 2015 [15 favorites]

TkNSk?
posted by josher71 at 11:43 AM on January 24, 2015

How much do sucked tokens cost? Could you go to Chinatown and buy a fake Louis Vouton bag full of sucked tokens if someone led you down the right alley?
posted by oceanjesse at 11:44 AM on January 24, 2015

So, wait, it doesn't refer to brief, pro forma fellatio?
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:54 AM on January 24, 2015 [12 favorites]

OHHHH, now I get it.
posted by josher71 at 11:55 AM on January 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

The really sad thing is that this practice probably wouldn't even make the list of the Top 1000 Terrible Things People Did For Money In Order To Buy Crack In 1980s New York City.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:10 PM on January 24, 2015 [6 favorites]

The tone of this article gives me the willies. It seems almost like the fond nostalgia pieces where people talk about the pre-computer inconveniences of rotary dial telephones. "Oh, technology is replacing this old way of life, and we realize the new way is better, but we'll still kind of miss it, you know?"
posted by jacquilynne at 12:17 PM on January 24, 2015

And deterrence, when dealing with someone willing to clamp his mouth to one of the most public surfaces in all of New York City, was next to impossible.

It's dishearteningly predictable that the response is to talk about deterrence, not "how do we make the world such that sucking tokens out of turnstiles isn't a good option for people?"
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:22 PM on January 24, 2015 [31 favorites]

Yes, absolutely, FFFM -- that the perceived solution to this problem was to make token sucking more painful is far more disgusting than the act of token sucking ever could be.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:29 PM on January 24, 2015 [9 favorites]

It seems almost like the fond nostalgia pieces where people talk about the pre-computer inconveniences of rotary dial telephones.

On a rotary line it was possible to dial a number -- especially a short one like 0 to get an operator -- by brushing a couple of bare wires together. In fact this is how Hannibal Lecter redirects his guaranteed private pre-dialed lawyer call to an operator and thence to the newspaper to place classified ads in the original Red Dragon novel. That doesn't work with DTMF or digital.
posted by localroger at 12:30 PM on January 24, 2015

It's dishearteningly predictable that the response is to talk about deterrence

Aren't we talking about the same country that once added methanol to moonshine? The coin suckers are lucky they didn't paint the token slots with rat poison.
posted by localroger at 12:31 PM on January 24, 2015 [13 favorites]

Bart Simpson: (Holding out cup for change) Ladies and gentlemen, l'm sorry to disturb your pleasant ride but unlike yourselves, l was born without taste buds. Let me demonstrate. (Licks subway pole).
Bart: (shuddering) l'm in over my head here.
posted by 445supermag at 12:32 PM on January 24, 2015 [13 favorites]

Huh, now I'm wondering the extent to which we have token-suckers in Philly.
posted by desuetude at 12:37 PM on January 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

''Anyways, I've kissed women that's worse.''
posted by acb at 12:39 PM on January 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

So, wait, it doesn't refer to brief, pro forma fellatio?

Pro forma oral sex will never go out of style.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:00 PM on January 24, 2015

TkNSk?
posted by josher71 at 11:43 AM on January 24 [+] [!]

OHHHH, now I get it.
posted by josher71 at 11:55 AM on January 24 [1 favorite +] [!]

I still don't get it. What does it mean? Now I'm super curious.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:14 PM on January 24, 2015

I think it's a tech joke where TkNSk is tokensuck a new app of some sort.
posted by josher71 at 1:19 PM on January 24, 2015

Ewwww. This article makes me cringe hard enough, I imagine it would kill a true germophobe.
posted by Artw at 1:21 PM on January 24, 2015

It's a play on the sharing economy. The trendy consonants should evoke imagery of venture capital, flat design, and location awareness.
posted by oceanjesse at 1:29 PM on January 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Reminds me of this way of separating egg yolks from the whites.

Also, eww. I wonder if the TTC in Toronto has this problem because I use tokens for my commute, and it makes me want to just dump all of my things into a punch bowl of hand sanitizer when I get home.
posted by cyberscythe at 1:34 PM on January 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

> ''These guys had a lot of various diseases,'' he said. ''You name it, they had it. You don't last too long in that line of work.''

Token sucking could be the origin story for a really lousy supervillain, or at least a secondary character in Preacher.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:51 PM on January 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

Wait, wait... And I touched those slots.

Ick, ick, ick, ick!
posted by Splunge at 1:56 PM on January 24, 2015

The tone of this article gives me the willies. It seems almost like the fond nostalgia pieces where people talk about the pre-computer inconveniences of rotary dial telephones.
I kind of read the article as being written like a parody of that "Disappearing Manhattan" stuff.
posted by bleep at 2:00 PM on January 24, 2015

Counterpoint: I read your column and it made me puke.
posted by thelonius at 3:01 PM on January 24, 2015

...and that's how we invented super herpes.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:47 PM on January 24, 2015 [6 favorites]

I think it's a tech joke where TkNSk is tokensuck a new app of some sort.
posted by josher71 at 1:19 PM on January 24 [+] [!]

Ohhhhh, I think you're right! I feel a bit silly now. Thanks for explaining it--I would have wondered for a long time...
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 5:03 PM on January 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I miss the Tunnel Vision column. There's a book compiling all the columns, which I really need to get for myself now.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:03 PM on January 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Circa 1985, there was about a 40% chance that the token sucked would be for the Connecticut Turnpike. Those were 17.5 cents each (roll of 40 for $7), and a great substitute for the 75-cent subway tokens. In one month, about 100,000 out of 250,000 tokens recovered from subways had been purchased for the Turnpike. It was New York-style arbitrage in action.

NYC demanded that CT recall their new tokens and roll out a different size. CT declined; one official noted that the NYC turnstiles would probably also accept bottle caps. For other reasons, CT soon disbanded tolls on the Turnpike, launched a buyback program for unused tokens, and that issue came to an end.
posted by kurumi at 12:24 AM on January 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

On a rotary line it was possible to dial a number -- especially a short one like 0 to get an operator -- by brushing a couple of bare wires together.

My favorite trick was just flashing the hook switch, which did the same thing essentially if the phone wasn't designed to prevent it, or designed in such a way that happened to make it impossible (three quick "hang-up" jabs at the hook switch = "3", I forget "0").

"Newer" desk-style rotary phones like this were particularly easy to use this way and were popular in waiting rooms and hotels and such.

The interesting part is trying to remember the purposes for doing so. The transition to touch-tone was well underway, but rotaries seemed more populate at a time in business settings, likely because they were super sturdy and expensive to last through years of abuse, so no rush to get rid of them, and I vaguely remember little security mechanisms like locking the rotary dialer somehow to only let you dial a few internal numbers.

I know that you could get long distance or at least local calls on certain phones that were designated for a single purpose and only had speed-dial buttons, like an elevator phone with a "call button."

I vaguely remember using it somehow as a way of dialing "9" to dial an "outside" line once on a touch tone phone, and the trick just being cool to demonstrate in particular on touch tone phones, because it made so little to sense to people why it worked without the "click-click" rotary system in your brain to clue you in how rotary is just this primitive "car-jacker hitting wires together in a cadence like an 80's movie" signalling system.

In that case I suspect the phone system was modern touch-tone and PBX based but still used analog phone signaling that was equally compatible with DTMF and rotary dialing, the phone system was able to disallow a leading "9" touch-tone (DTMF) done but was just passing my rotary signals through "backwards-compatible-like" without looking at and examining the sequence, which could also explain using it for long distance on a phone system that prohibits a leading "1" (USA-dialing-speak for "out of state")

As for tokens, when I first started taking my son to Chuck E Cheese (the one that happened to be my first employer as a teen) he made a beeline for this "monster truck" ride that just kind of awkwardly shakes around, eventually doing so at a weird OFF-ROAD'N angle that makes most parents hover around waiting to catch their kid in the event they are ejected. I realized there were nooks and crannies in the seat and along the doors and harvested tokens consistently from it on each trip. I felt like quite the sophisticated token-harvester, but after a while nothing was done about the truck that I could see, but I could never find tokens in at again.

It used to be that these tokens were $0.25 a pop or four for a buck and coupons were used to lower the price to around five or six for a buck. Now they are more like three for a buck from the machines because they want you to lay out at least $20 immediately, and the machines tend to sucker in kids who have allowance or whatever and don't want to talk to someone at the counter every time they decide to burn another buck or mooch one off of an uncle.

For $20 at the counter they'll happily give you the old 4-for-$1 pricing, but you may have to specifically point it out. But if you go to their website on a desktop computer in advance, or a desktop-user-agent-capable browser on your mobile device, and look for coupons in your area, you'll find the $20 for 100 tokens deal. If you buy tokens with your pizza, you're getting 4-for-$1 pricing again but you think you're getting a deal because you're buying super-overpriced terrible food also.

Naturally class ties into all of this, too. It's really obnoxious to encounter that sort of nickel-and-diming almost haggle-like complexity around the value of Chuck E Cheese tokens. They've always promised that every game will run off of a single token (if I recall correctly) so they've had to slowly manipulate the pricing over time...

How does tie in with the FPP? Not sure, but magnetic-strip cards have replaced tokens in most "non-vintatage non-hipster non-dive-bar" arcade situations in my life outside of Chuck E Cheese and Casa Bonita. Damn you magnetic strips. Also, class ties into all of this somehow, I have token privilege and try to share this information, as suspect I get better token pricing than a lot of people who don't have the time to do token research in between multiple energy-sucking jobs and parenting, and it seems shittory.
posted by aydeejones at 3:37 AM on January 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

To tie my CEC experience with what kurumi said, in my high school Chuck E Cheese employee days I would acquire tokens in a clandestine fashion and took them to the "Red Baron" arcade at the Westminster Mall. It was the only arcade I've ever been to with "compatible" tokens. Case Bonita's are not compatible.

We would go over to the token machine and pretend to buy them in bulk from the machine, dumping them out of our hoodie pockets all ninja-like. A friend of ours got busted and squealed on the whole operation. They formed an allegiance, Red Baron and Chuck E Cheese management, to fight token cross-contamination, and it became very difficult after that to muster the courage to go in there. As I recall they also ended up coming up with better "at the counter" pricing so they'd be like HEY IF YOU COME UP HERE IT'S CHEAPER! and we'd be like NO THX
posted by aydeejones at 3:40 AM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, at one point I was tasked with going through eight billion (seemingly) tokens and remove all of the non-CEC branded ones before they could be re-sold.

As I said, Red Baron was the only "compatible" arcade that I knew of, and there were plenty of those to filter out, but we accumulated tokens from all sorts of places across the country, and some of them had naked people on them, which we found amusing.
posted by aydeejones at 3:42 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

The interesting part is trying to remember the purposes for doing so. The transition to touch-tone was well underway, but rotaries seemed more populate at a time in business settings, likely because they were super sturdy and expensive to last through years of abuse, so no rush to get rid of them, and I vaguely remember little security mechanisms like locking the rotary dialer somehow to only let you dial a few internal numbers.

Rotaries remained in business settings because of the prevalance of crossbar PBX's. It's simple to switch to DTMF at home; once they've upgraded the exchange all you have to do is trade in your phone. Not so for a business which has an entire room full of relays and switching gear of its own. There were crossbar PBX's in operation in plants along the Mississippi River well into the 1980's and I remember peeking in to watch them operate.

If you have an all mechanical rotary-only PBX you're going to be feeding rotary signals to the phone company, so the exchanges had to remain compatible for a long time.

DTMF switching equipment was also a lot more expensive when it first came out, as even the most minimal implementation involved a computer back when people were trying to figure out what to do with that 4004 thing Intel had made and a minicomputer with 4K of 16-bit RAM ran about $40,000 and required a totally different skill set to operate and maintain than the mechanical equipment. There were economies of scale that made the switchover worthwhile for the phone company which businesses with their own switching equipment didn't enjoy.
posted by localroger at 5:47 AM on January 25, 2015

I remember about 1995, I was going somewhere for vacation that had only a rotary phone, and I bought a dial tone generator thing at Radio Shack that you held up to the mouthpiece and punched numbers into. This was so I could check messages on my voice mail, although, as I recall, it didn't really work very reliably.

I was surprised to be dealing with this in 1995. The property owner had a thing about keeping the place the way it had always been, I think, free of the corrupting influence of the modern world with its dial-tone phones and mosquito screens that work.
posted by thelonius at 7:17 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I remember when my brother gave our local arcade a $10 bill and we got $110 worth of tokens because the cashier fat-fingered it. We kept them in a bucket and still had a few left when they went out of business.
posted by michaelh at 9:23 AM on January 25, 2015

My favorite trick was just flashing the hook switch...The interesting part is trying to remember the purposes for doing so.

In the 1980s, the campus radio station had a dial-less rotary phone, to receive dial-in requests. We used to use the flash-the-hook trick to call the local pizza place for delivery.

Getting back to NYC subways: Historical images of New York City Subway. Also the MTA Transit Museum is worth a trip if you are interested.
posted by fings at 1:24 PM on January 25, 2015

When I sold my house before moving to Florida, the new owners insisted that I leave the black rotary phone that we had on a table in the entry hall. I regret it to this day.
posted by Splunge at 3:42 PM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

As I said, Red Baron was the only "compatible" arcade that I knew of, and there were plenty of those to filter out, but we accumulated tokens from all sorts of places across the country, and some of them had naked people on them, which we found amusing.

As I've said elsewhere, I worked in a shitty riverboat casino right out of college. Cross-contamination of slot tokens and even table chips was a minor but presistant problem. When the amounts got large enough to justify, the low-level managers would to take road trips to make exchanges with other casinos in the region. It seemed pretty informal given how tightly everything else was controlled though I never went myself.

And while I never witnessed any token-sucking at the slot machines, every month or so some bozo would try to attach a string to a token and pull it back out, as though the machine-makers hadn't thought to prevent that back in the 30's or whatever.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 7:26 AM on January 26, 2015

When I sold my house before moving to Florida, the new owners insisted that I leave the black rotary phone that we had on a table in the entry hall. I regret it to this day.

Moving to Florida?
posted by entropicamericana at 3:35 PM on January 26, 2015 [1 favorite]