_If you sit at the James E. Foy Information Desk in the Melton Student Center at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?”

A little later, the phone will ring again, and the caller might ask, “Who is the most famous person in the world?” Your next question: “How do you get the Super Serum in Call of Duty?” And finally, when you pick up the phone close to eleven o’clock, quitting time, you might hear someone blow a giant raspberry then hang up.

I spent the better part of two days and nights listening to students answer questions at the Foy desk, where phones have been ringing since 1953, when James E. Foy, Auburn’s then dean of students, opened the line as a resource for students and then as a service to the public. For just as long, students who sit there have been answering any question asked of them—or at least tried their best.

_The desk looks different today than it did seventy years ago. For starters, it’s in an expensive, modern-looking student center. The old Foy Hall still exists, and now houses a few small student-engagement offices; but it’s got low ceilings and could use an update. There used to be stacks of books at the desk—encyclopedias and dictionaries, reference texts, phone books, the Farmers’ Almanac, the Guinness Book of World Records, and Emily Post’s Etiquette—but they’ve been replaced by three desktop iMacs, the really nice ones, whose backs are blue and orange, like the school’s colors. As for the phone number, that’s still the same: (334) 844-4244.

A day’s worth of calls to Foy would look a lot like someone’s browser history: What is cefuroxime prescribed for? What’s the average cost of an acre of land in Texas? What’s the cheapest property in New Jersey? How much is Elon Musk worth? What’s the customer service phone number for Costco? How much is a ticket to the Super Bowl? What is watercress? What is that weird smell? Are AirPods Pro 2 waterproof? What do I do if there’s a snake in my house? What are all the names for female genitals? (Foy student workers won’t respond to that last question, but that doesn’t stop callers from asking it.) 

About 13 million people in the US  and 2.6 billion people globally don’t use the internet, whether for reasons of availability, desire, cost, or religion. Some may have it but don’t feel confident using it. To their callers, who dial from all over the world, these students are the internet. And lucky for callers, these students are remarkably non-judgmental when it comes to the questions they’re asked.

The employee manual for the Foy desk is ten sheets of 8.5x11, with instructions on how to clock in and out and pick up shifts. Training for the phones is minimal. More or less, the rules are these: Be as polite as possible, end the call if the question is offensive, don’t answer anything that sounds like a homework question, and if someone makes a threat, hang up and dial *57 (that helps the police trace the call), then tell your supervisor.

During the day, the phones ring about ten to fifteen times an hour. Most of the calls are from the general public. Occasionally, an Auburn student calls to ask about basketball tickets or whether their brown jacket ended up in the lost and found. As classes wrap up for the afternoon and the sun sets, the big windows that filter sunlight turn into mirrors. Calls become less frequent, so students working at the desk settle into their homework. It’s a perk of the job. By nine o’clock, the student center is quiet. That’s when people like Beulah call.

_Beulah has a lot of pets and an affinity for bearded dragons. She seems to attract wild animals too: There’s been a fox in her yard, a snake in her house, a spider on her curtains. She’s called to ask for the phone number for an exterminator more than once. While most callers are off the line in less than two minutes, Beulah’s calls last at least fifteen. But who she is, the students hardly know. Accents are sometimes a giveaway, but hers isn’t Southern, nor is it apparently from the Northeast, where her area code suggests she lives. Kamran Kimber, an overachieving junior studying business management, loves getting Beulah’s calls. “She sounds like—oh, my goodness—who was the lady who played in White Lotus?” He stops to think. “Jennifer Coolidge. She sounds like her.”

Students glean information about their regular callers slowly. They’re not expressly forbidden to ask questions, but this is Alabama, and many of the students working at the desk were born and raised here or come from neighboring southern states. Even when drunk people from frat parties call, many student workers don’t hang up unless the partiers say something inappropriate. After all, being intoxicated doesn’t mean you don’t have a legitimate question. Foy student workers have exceptional manners, and they don’t go poking around in someone else’s business.

With so little information, students are left to imagine who their callers might be. They stitch together an image informed by the caller’s voice, their accent, their area code, and their questions. In the 2010s, there was the Care Home Lady, who called every night. Matt Sheorn was picking up the phone back then, when he was an undergrad. He can’t remember the nature of Care Home Lady’s questions, just that he imagined her sitting alone in a nursing home, and that he was always happy to stay on the phone as long as she needed. “You can’t help but imagine what they’re like and in what setting,” he told me. “Is she just sitting in a rocking chair at night and just picks up that phone and keeps dialing Foy?” He wonders: Did she spend all day thinking about what question to ask?

_Even though they don’t know much about the lives of their regulars, the students miss them if they don’t call. I asked some of the students about the last time they heard from Beulah, and no one could name a recent call. “I really hope she’s OK,” one of them told me, looking a little grave.

Braxton Stacey is a senior studying industrial and systems engineering. He comes from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a small town on the Tennessee River close to the borders of Mississippi and Tennessee. He has the pleasing and hard-to-identify southern accent of someone who comes from a border town.

He’s a supervisor at the desk, which means he mostly checks people into reserved conference rooms in the student center and locks up the building at the end of the night. He’s also backup for the three students answering calls. But before his promotion, he worked the phones.

He told me that, one night, “this old woman called, and this is the only time I ever talked to her, but she talked for about an hour. She honestly wasn’t asking much of anything. But she told me—and I don’t know how true this is—she told me that one of her friends had recently passed away, and so she was just calling to talk. That felt good just to let her talk to me. I didn’t have to say much. She was just—she needed somebody.” She told Braxton about her grandkids and her house needing repairs and how she was getting them done. Ordinary things. “It wasn’t anything too specific,” he said. “Except for her friend.”

Calls like these don’t come in as often as ones about, say, whether a certain type of rocking chair is on sale at Lowe’s or what the weather will be this weekend in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. But every single one gets the same amount of respect.

Call after call comes in during the hours that I sit at the desk. Someone calls to ask about the net worth of a real estate investor named David Lichtenstein. Another, who sounds like a tiny child, asks how far it is from Earth to Pluto. The questions are so varied, so unique, I ask the students, “Don’t you wonder why these people call?” Sometimes, they tell me, but as far as they’re concerned, it’s none of their business. They admit that some people feel the need to explain why they call so often—that they live out in the sticks or can’t afford the internet. But to these students, why someone calls doesn’t matter. It’s just their job to help.

_On my first night at the desk, a student supervisor comes out to shake my hand. It’s Cora Baldwin, a senior about to finish her degree in software engineering. Her voice is soft and gentle, maybe a little nervous, like she’s afraid she might be intruding. She shows me around the desk and introduces me to the students answering the phones. “I’m not really sure how to host you,” she says, “but I want to make you feel welcome. What can we do?”

The students let me hover over their shoulders while they do their jobs. There’s a lot of “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am.” Students say they know which callers expect to be addressed that way. The thicker the southern accent, the greater the expectation.

Hours later, the building is quiet, Foy is about to close for the night, and we’ve likely heard the last of the calls. The students and I are circled up in our rolling chairs, and they’re telling stories about their favorite calls. Many they’ve never shared before. Like late-night conversations in college tend to do, the mood becomes confessional. Cora says she believes the calls she answers are the ones she’s meant to answer. No coincidences. I want to know whether there have been any calls that the students just can’t get out of their heads. One of them talks about the hour they spent on the phone with a caller, helping her plan a trip from Arizona to Canada. Another talks about a kid who called to complain that he was bored, but clearly he was alone and very, very lonely. That was a long call.

Then Cora tells us this: Two years ago, while working a day shift, she answered a call from an older gentleman. He had a list of celebrities and wanted her to look up their birthdays, month and day. “As I read out the dates, he would say something like ‘Mmmhmm, OK. OK, that makes sense.’” He told her that he could deduce things about people with no more information than that. They chatted about what Cora was studying, and what kind of career she had in mind. Another caller who needed someone to talk to, she figured. “Then he asked for my birthday.” When Cora told him, “He says, ‘Oh, you don’t want to be a software engineer, you want to work with people.’”

He was right, though Cora had never said it out loud. “Really, I’ve always had an affinity toward broken people,” she says. “I’d like to set up a commune for runaway girls. Growing up in my small town, people really didn’t go into protective services. They just stayed in their bad situations. I’d like to do that.” This is news to her colleagues on the desk, who have always pictured her as a coder. But it makes sense, they tell me. Cora is exactly the kind of person who should be taking in people who need help. “But I probably won’t,” she says, and shrugs. “I need a job.”

I say to her, “Still, when I asked you to name a call you can’t forget, that’s the one you brought up. It must have meant something to you.” It did, Cora admits. Like she said before, she doesn’t really believe in coincidences. But how that fits into her life, she can’t picture yet