For months no airline would take my calls. When they heard my call was related to brochure distribution, “We’ve already got that covered,” they said. How could they consider themselves “covered,” though, when only maybe two out of a hundred hotels in New York had their schedules? And those two were on the verge of closing for lack of business.

Finally, one airline executive told me they used a firm called Timetable & Folder Distributors, who handled their distribution for the whole mid-Atlantic region.

“But they’re not doing anything,” I protested. I’d seen unopened bundles of airline brochures in garbage pails behind hotel desks. “Everything is just getting dumped.”

“Couldn’t be,” he told me. “We’ve been using these guys for as long as anyone can remember. Anyway, I can’t really waste time worrying about brochures. We have more important marketing concerns. Sorry.” And that was it. He didn’t care what kind of job they were doing or what the airline was charged. And he was not alone. All the others felt the same way.

Maybe if I couldn’t get the airlines as clients directly, I could convince Timetable to subcontract their distribution to me so that the material actually got displayed. I made an appointment and went to see them. I was amazed. It was as if you’d entered a time warp. The office filled the same floor they’d occupied in a lower Manhattan loft building for close to fifty years. The desks were all oak. The switchboard still required an operator to plug in wires to connect calls and there was a cavernous area still filled with boxes of brochures for tourist attractions or railroads that had been out of business for decades.

There was another strange thing. There were hardly any people to fill all the desks and packing stations. It was like a neutron bomb had wiped out all the people decades ago and left the facilities intact. Only a couple of women had apparently survived and kept the memory alive, running to plug in the switchboard before running back to answer the phone. No one ever made a sales call here. No one ever visited. Not even the directors of the company.