About Julia & Edward

Last December a TracPhone was found at the restaurant I work for and it remained unclaimed for some time.

I found a charger to check if there were minutes left on it.

There were about a hundred minutes left but also, you know, about a year’s worth of text messages between the phone’s owner and his prostitute.

While the conversation is incredibly soppy at times, it never gets too disgusting. In certain periods you might even believe that the phone’s owner, Ed, and his provider, Jul, shared a connection that transcended the “business”-only relationship. But maybe she’s just that good.

A ton of interesting stuff can be inferred from the hundreds of messages. He is a painter of some sort who gets at least one or two commissions during this time. She is (likely) a Brazilian citizen with an elementary/middle-school aged son. They tend to meet in midtown hotels.

For all of my friends I have taken the time to transcribe and timestamp every message into a spreadsheet so that the conversation can be read in sequence.

A couple editorial notes:

It begins January 2011 and ends when the phone is lost somewhere around the start of December 2011.
The call logs on this phone only collected the last 30 incoming and outgoing calls. As such, the insertion of call information only begins around September.
The texts at the end of the spreadsheet with no timestamps had their timestamps mangled by the TracPhone’s lack of storage space. These messages, which could be from several points in the timeline, kept appearing as new messages dated from whenever the phone was powered on last. Maybe you can figure out where they go.
The phone was handed in by a guest who originally found it outside the restaurant.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Julia & Edward: An SMS Story

February 14, 2012