Forget the Golden Gate Bridge and House of Nanking and Zeitgeist on a summer night -- the heart of San Francisco beats loudest on the carpeted second floor of that South Van Ness building you thought was Bank of America.

"Thank you for calling San Francisco 311, this is Kyle speaking, how may I help you?"

"Yes, there's a skunk with his head stuck ..."

Kyle Sutton is one of 50 or so customer service representatives, or CSRs, asking this question 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The free service launched in March not just to funnel 2,300 government phone numbers into a single line, but to give the city more of a service orientation. About 6,000 calls come in every day, and program director Ed Reiskin says 311 is on track to answer 2 million a year.

Officially, the purpose is to supply a handy route to non-emergency government services and information. Unofficially, it's a glimpse into the funny inner mind of the city.

"Hello, how long does it take to build a cable car?"

"There's cocaine all over my clothes! There's cocaine everywhere!"

"My roommate has been passed out for two days."

"There's pig balls on the street."

Ideally, every call would be like these and our city would have the best dinner parties ever. In fact, most people call about the bus. How do you get to Justin Herman Plaza? I'm on Clement and 8th Avenue, where's the 2? My driver didn't stop for me. There's cocaine all over the 24. (OK, that last one was just a guess.)

What these calls lack in color, they make up for in mind-blowing bulk. Roughly 4,000 MUNI calls a day, and less than half a year into 311's existence -- who knew a fairly straightforward bus schedule could yield so much confusion?

It couldn't, some CSRs suspect. What 311 has laid bare isn't a mystifying bus schedule but a mystifying wedge of human nature. Give people a free phone number and they'll call it.

"Some people just seem to like to talk," Sutton says. "Or else ask questions. We try to get them what they need and politely move on to the next call."

Anonymity. Technology. Excessive information gathering. The elements of 311 are very much those of the Internet age (do people still say that?), and in ways the service resembles a kind of Google hotline just for San Francisco. As with Google, it seems the service can give rise to the questions, rather than vice versa. (One of the more common questions: What time is it?)

A sweet intimacy sometimes makes its way onto the line. The other day, a couple of girls placed a three-way call asking which buses would get them to each other; as Sutton pulled up the information, the two chitchatted. Other times, the intimacy goes too far. ("Is there anything else I can help you with today?" "Well, not over the phone ...")

Some callers enjoy 311 so much they call back again and again. Perhaps the most well-known serial caller has dubbed himself "the Graffiti Wolf."

"He walks around the city on the phone, calling in all the graffiti he sees. He might call five to seven times a day. I once had him give me 35 reports on one call," says Michelle Hampton, another CSR here. "At one point he just said, 'This is what I do.'"

Other serial callers already have reputations elsewhere in the city -- with the police, for instance. Sutton recalled one woman who complained that her neighbors were spraying something under her doors, in an attempt to suffocate her. When Sutton told police of the call, they more or less sighed.

"Turns out they'd already sent seven officers on seven different occasions," Sutton said. "They didn't find anything sprayed under her door."

Neighbors are a recurring motif. There was the woman whose neighbor kept talking to a boulder. Used to be, she talked to raccoons and squirrels, but the city came and spoke with her -- huh? -- and now she was onto large rocks. Which wouldn't have been a problem had this particular rock not been perched on a hill above the caller's house. And had the boulder-talker not gotten in the habit of digging around the base of the thing during every conversation. One day, the caller said, that boulder's going to roll right through my sliding doors.

The CSRs got on it. An Environment Department team was dispatched to remove the boulder.

Reiskin describes 311 as a rare service that touches all parts of the city -- no mean trick, given the horizontal arrangement of San Francisco government. Unlike, say, Oakland, no city administrator runs the city's day-to-day affairs; Mayor Gavin Newsom is the sole point of authority for the assorted and largely autonomous agencies. For a CSR to know how to register someone for a Parks & Rec program, get a document from the Office of Vital Records or report a pothole to the Department of Public Works, Reiskin says, 311 must first knock on a lot of government doors.

"We never want to say, 'I don't know,'" Reiskin says.

If you're picturing a chaotic air-traffic-control environment, take it down a notch. The office is busy but not frantic, efficient but not harried, big but not sprawling. Sutton, Hampton and the other CSRs have an air of Zen to them even as they zip from screen to screen, transitioning from lost birth certificates to mattresses abandoned on sidewalks.

Most of all, they're bizarrely pleasant. That evil AT&T operator you got last week? Not even the same species. The CSRs here aren't just kind and knowledgeable, they seem to be genuinely curious about, say, how long garbage cans can stay out on the street, too. Four months of training weeds out those who lack the patience that Sutton calls essential. Salaries range from $49,000 to $59,000.

Incidentally, don't fret if you prefer to report your potholes in Greek. Over 150 languages can be accommodated, thanks to a network of interpreters on standby. Of course confusion, is possible even with translation.

"My neighbor's window is open," one caller told Hampton.

"I see."

"The city needs to close it."

"Well, it's not illegal for a neighbor to have his or her window open."

"But the window is open ..."

The conversation went on and on, Hampton recalls, without much deviation from that central theme. Finally she had an idea.

"Is this a window that isn't supposed to be there?"

"Yes."

"Are you saying it was built without a permit?"

"Yes."

A bit more detective work and the situation was resolved. It's no wonder Hampton is the CSR that the mayor gets paired with, when he visits.

"He just sits here and listens to the conversations," Hampton reports. "Sometimes he'll even jump in. I'll finish answering the caller's question and he'll say, 'This is Mayor Newsom, I just wanted to thank you for calling 311 today.' They're usually a little stunned a first, then appreciative. One guy started to tell him what he really thought of him. The mayor just listened and thanked him."

Other common calls: Come get rid of this mattress on the sidewalk. I need a birth certificate. My streetlight's out. The breadth of the city's responsibilities are staggering -- as Sutton scrolled, I saw one page dedicated to reports of dead mice or rats on public property.

"I had no idea there are so many programs where the city is actually trying to help citizens," Hampton says. "And I had no idea citizens were so well-versed in how a city works. San Franciscans have a real feeling that the government is responsible to them. And they'll express it."

Plugging in a set of headphones, I expected to overhear the sort of rudeness one associates with anonymous phone calls to large institutions. To my surprise, the majority of callers were friendly, even personable -- enough so that when one caller failed to thank Sutton for his help, it stood out.

"You know, I don't even notice anymore," he said when I remarked on it. "We get so many calls, it wouldn't work if we registered whether or not they say thanks."

Which isn't to say some calls aren't affecting.

"Someone might call in for bus information and then start talking about getting to the methadone clinic. Or maybe they're trying to find in-home healthcare for their grandfather, and you went through something similar -- you can't help but empathize sometimes," Hampton says.

"You try not to get attached, but there are those five or six calls each day that stick with you," Sutton says. "When an elderly woman calls needing services because she says her family doesn't love her, that's hard to hear."

Some time back, Sutton picked up the phone to the sounds of a grown man crying. The man had cashed a check that day, then left his wallet on the bus. It was his son's birthday, and he no longer had money for a present. Sutton worked overtime on this call, but by the end of the day he suspected the wallet was gone.

"He just kept saying, 'It's his birthday, it's his birthday,'" Sutton recalls.

Still, karma has a way of evening out at the call center. Just last week someone phoned about a wad of cash he'd found on a different bus. The information was noted, sent to the appropriate body and the next call was answered. Possibly skunk-related.

Chris Colin was a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He's the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93," about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of "The Blue Pages," a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.