PickMeUp And Hold Me Tight, or How I ended up war dialling the UK payphone estate

A talk from EMF 2022 by Sam Machin

On Sunday June 5, 2022 at in Stage B

Back in 2018 I got involved in an arts project called Pick Me Up and Hold Me Tight, by ZU-UK.

The goal was to raise awareness of male suicide by making all 34,000 UK pay phones ring at 11am on New Years Day.

Initially I backed their crowd funder as it seemed like a good cause and also I was curious how they were going to make that many phone calls technically. This is the story of how I ended up as the technical lead on the project and what we did to make a lot of phone calls in a very short space of time.

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