There are many hotlines for people who need advice. Yet there are none for people who need to give advice. If you are filled with tons of wisdom and possess an impeccable moral compass, you must bear this great burden alone. Well, no longer.
The Advice Line is the proprietary source for giving advice. We find smart, funny, beautiful people, to give advice to the less fortunate, less smart, less funny, and less beautiful members of society.
We identify these chosen people by soliciting them on the street with provocative, cryptic posters.
These solicitations are vague, so the caller would assume they’d be receiving advice, and hopefully be delighted to realize they were giving advice instead.
Intro of The Advice Line
The advice asks are mostly silly but all real problems that my friends face, such as:
“I keep getting chased by squirrels”
“I don’t own enough bowls”
“My roommate Regular Alex hates that there’s a Cool Alex”
After the caller leaves their advice, they are sent to the main menu, where the fun is only just beginning.
The Advice Line Main Menu
In the main menu, the caller can press:
to learn more about The Advice Line
to give more advice on The Advice Line
to ask for advice on The Advice Line
for The Advice Line official merch
to be sent on a wild goose chase
The Advice Line Official Merch Site
If you select 4, you’ll be directed to theadviceline.org. This site was designed to flesh out the lore of The Advice Line. It promotes fake merch - like The T-Shirt, The Same T-Shirt But More Expensive, The Crop Top (for when you want less shirt), and The Booty Shorts (for when you’re feeling saucy). Everything is out of stock.
The site also hosts some very unhelpful FAQs to deepen the intrigue around The Advice Line.
But most of all, I created this website because I wanted to create my very first website from scratch <3 homecooked HTML and CSS, with a sprinkling of Javascript, just like mama used to make. Except that I was doing sick, twisted, disgusting things in CSS that would make Ada Lovelace turn over in her grave. My code is like really, really bad - so don’t go inspecting the page or anything crazy.
The Advice Line Wild Goose Chase
If you select 5, you’ll be directed to an elaborate phone tree, which is deliberately very frustrating (as opposed to other phone trees, which are simply aggravating by nature).
Questions have correct & incorrect answers, and answering incorrectly will bounce you back in the tree or kick you off the line altogether, so you have to re-dial and give more advice to return. Content includes questions like “how many fingers am I holding up,” fake personality tests, challenges to confront your fears, etc - all in the soothing yet thrilling tone of a robovoice. All in all, it takes about 5-15 minutes to get through.
You may be curious how many people completed the phone tree. I created a counter, but fucked it up and couldn’t be bothered to fix it, so everyone was told that they were the fifth person to reach the end. So - “five.”
The Advice Line Soundcloud Rapper Arc
Since I had all these audio clips of my friends asking for advice, and strangers sharing their wisdom, I decided to turn some into a song.
I debuted this project last week at The Intersection of Art and Technology saloon, which was super fun.
Acknowledgements:
An inspiration for this project was the desire to become more technical. My entanglements with programming were always well-meaning but short-lived, a semester of AP Comp Sci here, a summer romance with R there, but nothing compared to the love affair of learning Python. I was contemplating going back to JavaScript, but my friend John sung the praises of Python, so I gave it a shot, and was enamored. It was just so easy with Python, I felt like I already understood it, and we had this unspoken language (cuz it’s typed).
Anyways. I used Twilio as the underlying framework for all the phone stuff, and Python to tell Twilio what I wanted it to do.
I would also like to say a big thank you to Riley Thayer Walz, who recommended Replit to me (after mocking me for planning to use AWS and offering to “come over and fix it”), let me use his Sequel Ace account, ChatGPT prompted some code to connect Replit to Twilio and Sequel Ace, asked if I was even learning anything or just getting free labor from him (I was learning tons), and said it would’ve probably taken me months longer to complete this project without his help (I grant one month, singular). Not only a good friend and helpful, he is also a god-like figure to me and is also 6’3”.
Also a big thank you to my friends who submitted their biggest, silliest problems to The Advice Line. If their issue was not fixed, well, I hope they were at least entertained.
Departing Wishes:
My dear reader, I hope you have learned something from this story. And if you are instead omnipotent, and have nothing left to learn, well then - I hope you choose to leave some advice after the beep.
Edit 1/10/25: SF Gate wrote an article about The Advice Line, read it here.
Thank you, this was so fun to be a part of, we need more things like this stapled on our telephone poles
Brilliant stuff!