Can You Read Me Now?

Lorenzo Combes

Granny's great uncle had an unusual job. Lorenzo Combes was hired by the Western Union Telegraph folks to walk all over the country and later the world, and write out telegrams and send them from different places. Usually they would say, "Can you read me now?"

Then they advertised in newspapers all over the place about having the biggest network of telegraph offices in the world.

As weird and pointless as his job seemed to most folks, it weren't no more weird than that poor feller that had to come into the telegraph office ever morning and receive those messages from Lorenzo. Story has it, he clicked out the morse code for "dammit! Yes!" just before he committed suicide in 1874.