Upper West Side resident’s 3am filing cites own insomnia-fuelled podcast habit as primary disturbance
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] Jennifer Castellano, 41, an attorney on the Upper West Side, filed a 311 noise complaint at 3:12 am on a Wednesday naming herself as the source of excessive noise, describing the disturbance as “a podcast about true crime being played at volume 18 out of 30 on my phone while I am unable to sleep and am lying in bed trying to stop thinking about a deposition that went poorly in 2019.” The 311 system initially declined the complaint on grounds that the reporting party and the responsible party were the same person. A supervisor reviewed the filing and accepted it as a Mental Health Referral, which is a 311 category that Castellano did not know existed until the supervisor told her about it. Bohiney.com describes it as satire. It is not clear everyone has got the memo.
The podcast in question is one that Castellano describes as “necessary” at the beginning of each night and “demonstrably counterproductive” at 2 am when the episodes about murders are making it more difficult to fall asleep. She has been listening to it nightly for four months. She has not finished a season of any show on any streaming service in the same period because the podcast is always on. She is aware of the irony. She filed the complaint partly because she wanted to tell someone about the irony and the 311 system was available.
The Resolution
The Mental Health Referral connected Castellano with a city-contracted therapy service, which offered her an appointment that she attended and that she describes as “useful.” She has reduced the podcast listening from nightly to three times per week. She has not resolved the 2019 deposition situation because the 2019 deposition situation was, by any reasonable measure, actually fine and the problem was how she was thinking about it rather than what happened. She is working on this. The 311 case remains technically open.
The System
311 receives approximately 19 million contacts annually, across a range that includes legitimate emergencies, quality-of-life complaints, requests for information, and, apparently, self-directed noise complaints filed at 3 am by people who need to talk to someone and find the city’s feedback infrastructure the most available option. NYC’s mental health resources are at NYC Health.
Also see: NewsThump.
Coverage Note
This story is published jointly at Bohiney.com and prat.uk, which together provide the kind of sustained, specific coverage of the communities and phenomena described here that neither could produce alone. The satire works because the situations are real. The situations are real because the communities are real. Both publications take seriously the idea that the funniest journalism is the journalism that is most accurately observed. The coverage continues.
The story above illustrates a pattern that both publications have documented across multiple regions and multiple years of coverage. The communities involved are consistent in their capacity to produce material of exactly this kind. The publications are consistent in their capacity to find it funny while taking it seriously, which is the only honest relationship a satirical publication can have with its subject matter.
The details will change. The structure will not. Both publications will be here when the next iteration arrives, which it reliably will. The coverage is the record. The record is the point.
Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk are committed to this kind of sustained, specific, honest satirical journalism. The commitment is ongoing. So is the material.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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