A Series of Futile Encounters

September in the City

I know I do not love New York as much as Zohran Mamdani loves New York, because I actively do not want to be in community with the lady feeding the pigeons at 72^nd and 2^nd last Tuesday morning at 7 am.

Our casual attempts to estimate exactly how many squats Brendan made us do (NEVER SKIP LEG DAY) was interrupted by a strange whirring and clicking. The sultry air filled with feathers as what could only be described as a pigeon tornado cascaded around us. In the eye of the storm stood an ordinary lady, dressed for work, so innocent-looking that we thought she was a fellow victim rather than the Prospero of Second Avenue, instigator of the tempest of feathers and mites raining down on all of us in front of the entrance to the Q.

“I fed them across the street and they followed me!” she said, infuriatingly bemused by the filthy fruits of her labors.

“I don’t think you should be feeding them at all.”

“YOU EAT, DON’T YOU!” And then my husband pushed me into traffic to separate us. We could hear her yelling as we continued walking.

So the fact that someone as smart and civic-minded as Zohran Mamdani wants anything to do with us as a citizenry is mind-blowing to me. I have spent the week becoming Javert from Les Miserables (Geoffrey Rush version).

(Me).

On Friday evening, a gentleman wearing a bucket hat walked into the AT&T store at 745 Broadway (the NYU one) and somehow bypassed their intense security through a feat of artful cunning (showed a fake ID, we think) in order to purchase a phone and two watches, which he added to our account with great ease. Upon receiving the receipts of his endeavors (AT&T texted to ask if we had enjoyed our interaction), we contacted the store, whose employees seemed more excited than alarmed to learn that their citadel had been thus breached.

One of them was kind enough to acknowledge that this must all be very “irritating” to me, and marveled that the gentleman thief “seemed like he was born in the ‘70s.” We both acknowledged the weirdness of this - scamming does seem like such a young man’s game.

But this man and his bucket hat are on a mission: he did it again the next day, at Ten Union Square East, which is .4 miles away from the original crime scene, as the overfed pigeon flies. This time, the staff was kind enough to offer to “flag” our account; an option we had not been made aware of at the time of the initial theft.

I was also referred to AT&T’s fraud protection line, which is staffed solely by robots who do not work weekends.

In the interim, I tried to speak to a human person via AT&T’s online chat. I was intercepted in my quest for justice by a “live representative” (which doesn’t NOT mean robot) who urgently wanted to make sure I am aware that I can save this month by adding a fax line for my personal business.

This, for some reason, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “I hate you,” I typed, “and I don’t believe you are a real person.” “I am a real person,” the entity responded. “And I love to help you.”