Hello, beautiful nerds. For the next couple of weeks, we're going to be airing a new series we're producing in collaboration with Campside Media. We're calling it service request, and it's hosted by longtime 99PI producer and editor Delaney Hall. It's a fun and joyful and detailed deep dive into stories about infrastructure.

We're looking at the nuts and bolts of how it actually works and the people who maintain it.

I am very excited for you to hear it and also to get involved because we will be taking your

questions about infrastructure and answering them in future episodes.

Here's our first story.

I guess to start, just tell me about your experience with Mr. Softie.

Mr. Softie. Mr. Frikin Softie, bane of my existence.

This is Christopher Johnson.

He's a supervising producer at 99% Invisible.

And one of the first things I learned about him when we started working together was that he hated ice cream trucks.

That fucking jingle comes along and it's like, oh my God, I kill me now.

Dun-na-na-na-da-da-na-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

It's the end of the song that's just like taunting you because you know it's going to start again.

About five or six years ago, COVID was just starting to hit, and Christopher was spending a lot of time locked down at home.

He'd just moved into an apartment in Washington Heights, a neighborhood at the very top of Manhattan.

And he was up on the 12th floor, high enough that he did not think he'd be dealing with a ton of street noise.

But then the next day, and the next day, and the next day, I'm hearing Mr. Softie pull up 12, 13 stories down, park on the corner wait for kids i guess and there are multiple

mr softies like there's one like two blocks down and because i'm high so high up i can hear the one

two blocks down the one it's just downstairs the one it's a couple of blocks behind me,

and they're just, it feels like at a certain point, I'm being trolled by Mr. Softie.

After weeks of this, Christopher got so fed up that he took action. He decided to call 311.

311 is a hotline that provides quick and easy access to all the information

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