What's on the Telephone Pole?

Chuckling, I snapped a photo of the Shake Shack bulletin board:

With the picture, it was time to take the fifteen minute walk back to Malone Center, Prospect Street, where I would have to stand another fifteen minutes outside.

Two summers ago, I was a productive, intelligent, independent, and valuable high school student. Two summers ago, I was also an intern of a Yale biomedical research lab. Also see: I was effectively useless.

I was a burden to my mentor, who was in the process of wrapping up a project; an annoying email spammer to my Principal Investigator, the head of the lab; an unwanted responsibility for the rest of the tired graduate students, grinding out their PhD. I never got key card access to my lab building all summer because no one thought that I could be trusted to swipe into the edifice with my own free will. I waited awkwardly outside every morning and every lunch, waiting to tailgate an indifferent researcher entering the lab.

With plenty of (unwanted) time, I wandered around New Haven during lunch, or how I like to call it, 2-hour breaks for my mentor not having to deal with me.

There are many ways to approach lunch breaks in an urban setting. New Haven is a pitifully small university town to be called a city, but a city regardless. You can look out for meals—choose your cuisine: Taste of China? Soul de Cuba? Sally’s Apizza? You can scour for desserts—ice cream at Arethusa Farm Dairy? Boba at Tai Chi Bubble Tea? A piece of cake from Tous Les Jours? You can stroll by events—what’s happening in the New Haven Green? Arts & Ideas? Yale School of Music trumpet player busking?

You’ve eaten your katsu curry from the Ingalls Rink food truck; you’ve grabbed your plastic cup of refreshing milk tea, extra lychee jelly; there’s nothing exciting happening on the Green; all there is left is to walk back to the lab, an hour left of your time.

But the building is locked, and no one wants to go back to an unwelcoming lab. Especially when you’re not a productive, intelligent, independent, and valuable intern.

So I walk around.

New Haven is quite old. We have wooden telephone posts and peeling metal traffic poles. They are never empty. Every pole never lets a bored pair of eyes rest, top to bottom taped, stapled, glued with signs—from professional employees, to desperate middle school students, to middle-aged residents with nothing better to do—all from people looking to grab your attention in a second-long glance while you wait for the traffic light.

The picture of the marijuana research ad in the downtown Shake Shack shop sparked a new interest in my boring summer days: a photo album titled “funny posters”. On a green telephone pole, rusting with brown marks, I added on July 25, 2022:

Words stand out in a poster. Usually, the hooking title, like a question, yells at you with big letters at the top, and the compensation is bolded at the bottom. Maybe my lab internship would have been better if it was paid. Yale does not pay underage interns.

“Be Part of Clinical Research at Yale,” each research poster read.

Frequently, I wondered if I should take up drinking when I reached the legal age so that I could participate in these quick money-grabs. I’d drink regularly, but in small amounts, so that I’d qualify for everything.

Research posters were definitely the most abundant, given that I wandered around Yale campus, especially towards science hill. I sometimes wondered how my summer would have turned out if I had worked in a lab that ran public clinical trials like these, instead of a bioinformatics lab that required me to sit in front of my overheating laptop for hours while a single line of code processed. Maybe I would have been stapling “ARE YOU RIGHT-HANDED” posters all over New Haven, a stack of thick, glossy papers in one arm, a strong, wood-grade stapler on the other. To this day, I have never caught anyone actively putting up posters on the poles. A friend in Boston once told me that he had seen a poster that said, “I put up posters.” with a phone number at the bottom. Plain and simple, black Arial text on white. Were Yale labs hiring poster boys going around like little gremlins at night, putting up embarrassing posters that they’d never get caught holding themselves as professional scientists and doctors?

Non-research posters were just as entertaining, however. A particular job advertisement was printed in squeaky-mint letter printer paper, which I surmised was typed up hastily in a word document with the default Calibri font:

Poster or sign? A rusty, wooden piece of plank cut out in a heart shape, peeling and falling apart, nailed to an equally peeling wooden pole, and written in a dying sharpie marker, read:

The ultimatum of my album came during the last week of my lab, August 16th:

This particular poster, I found so intriguing that I ended up posting the photo on Reddit (r/funnysigns) in order to find a source. The phone number seemed legitimate—with an area code (203)—but no chance I was going to text a number on a sketchy poster like this. One Redditor speculated that it implied a sex ad; another joked: “Yah I have been having a problem with wet walls.” A few months later, I coincidentally stumbled upon an Instagram page (@truewagner), who seemed to be the creator for meme posters like this. I never found this specific poster on his page, and his DMs were closed. Given the style, it probably is indeed Alan Wagner’s work—but I’ll never know for sure. To me, this is simply another addition to my “funny posters.”

With this poster, my internship came to a close. My Yale NetID expired, I lost access to my bioinformatics computing cluster, and I could no longer get into general access Yale buildings (not that I could get into Malone in the first place). But I lost one other thing. The “funny posters” album was never updated after that summer.

Some might describe this as a peculiar loss, because I now live in New Haven, walk around Yale campus every day as a student, and enter buildings full of interesting posters more often than I do bathrooms; yet the magic surrounding the city and my aura of curiosity as a useless high school student—gone. As a college student, as long as I don’t have class, I have infinite time to eat lunch, whether that be a chocolate muffin in my dorm room, or 4 pm sushi at the Bow Wow; I could easily replicate my long lab lunch walks. But I no longer stroll around campus taking pictures of posters looking for marijuana addicts not looking to quit.

Truth is, there was no magic of the posters from 2022. Posters are everywhere. But maybe there was a magic of 2022.

@truewagner on instagram