BUZET, Croatia: An American tourist who stepped into a disconnected phone booth on the edge of Buzet last Tuesday reports that although the line has been dead for years, he was placed on hold.
The booth stands beside the town notice board, which has not had a new notice added since roughly 2009 and is now held together mostly by the staples of old ones. The town was empty at the time. It often is in the early afternoon, when, according to the few residents anyone has managed to locate, everyone is either asleep or out in the hills looking for truffles.
The tourist, wearing board shorts despite being nowhere near a beach, said he picked up the receiver mostly as a joke. There was no dial tone. After a pause, a recorded voice told him in Croatian, and then in German that sounded learned from television, that all operators were busy and his call was important.
He stayed on the line for forty minutes. The hold music was a single accordion. Every ten minutes the recording updated his position in the queue, which went from fourth to sixth.
The regional phone company confirmed the booth was disconnected in 2014 and said no queue should exist. Asked who else could be in it, a spokesperson put the reporter on hold.
The afternoon bus came and went while he waited. The driver, who has passed the booth every day for eleven years, said this happens about once a summer, and that so far nobody has made it to the front.
FTN BULLETIN: This report is fiction.