Dialing up something unexpected…

On a busy stretch of Commonwealth Ave in Boston, something unusual is stopping people in their tracks: a payphone.

Its not broken. Not decorative. Fully working, with a simple prompt taped to the front: “Call a Boomer.”

Pick it up and instead of a dial tone, you’re instantly connected to another payphone sitting inside a senior living community in Reno, Nevada.

Who’s on the other end? In Boston, it’s mostly college students walking by. But in Reno, it’s residents aged 62 and up, many of them single or widowed, who pick up when the phone rings.

What happens next depends on who answers:

• Sometimes it’s a voicemail. One caller, Kyra, left a message hoping it might reach someone who needed to hear a kind voice that day. 
• Other times, it turns into a real conversation, like when a retired woman in Reno suddenly found herself talking to someone back in New Hampshire where she grew up.

It’s random and can be a little awkward at first. And then, surprisingly, not.

The project, which comes from Matter Neuroscience, is built on a pretty simple premise: younger and older people are two of the loneliest groups out there, and they almost never interact.

• Instead of building another app to “fix” that, they went the opposite direction. No screens or feeds, just a voice and a few minutes of purposeful attention.
• The project leaders hope a few moments of connection across age divides will remind people that they aren’t as alone as they may feel.

The best part about it? People are actually picking up. Staff at the Nevada elderly facility say residents get excited when the phone rings, while some Boston callers have gotten emotional mid-conversation. Even a few minutes can sometimes go a long way.