I can't remember when I met Joybubbles because I feel like I've known him forever. Like Joybubbles, I was sexually abused as a child, and so the phone became one of my fascinations. I have Cerebral Palsy, so back then I would mis-dial and frequently dial into other people's conversations. One of the neat things Joybubbles taught me was about "1-700-200" plus four numbers. So like if you wanted to hear the Nash car races, race was "7223". So y would dial 1-700-200-7223 and you would hear the races for free. Or "news" was 6397, and so on. It was fun dialing four letter words to see what I might get. So Joybubbles and I would share stuff between each other and had fun.
In my early 20's I had a communication device called a "Liberator", there's a picture of it up at the top. This thing was awesome because it was 100 percent programmable with a built-in modem and printer. I was dangerous! I was only upset because the modem was set at a 300 baud rate rather than at 110 baudo. Joybubbles taught me that a baudo was for TTY/TDD, which was basically a phone or the deaf or speech impaired. Joybubbles actually knew the codes for each letter, which blew me away. I had an actual TDD, so for fun I programmed the Liberator to transmit a few letters to my TDD. It was fun, but totally useless because the Liberator had no way to receive. I quickly got board with it even though it was fascinating.
My own interest was getting the device to sing. Heck, if I could mimic a TDD, I could do anything! My fun with Joybubbles made it easier to figure out how to get the speech software to sing. It took me years to figure it out on my own. After the word got out that I could program songs, I started getting song requests from disabled people who also wanted to sing with their devices. So it turned into a worldwide business. Being I work with phonetic sounds, I can do songs in any language.
Joybubbles has taught me that it's the small things in life that matter the most. I have ran across a few people who didn't want to talk using their devices. But once I made their devices sing, it changed everything for them. I thank Joybubbles for being my inspiration.
