Here’s a confession; I turned 47 last week and I still delight in making a good prank phone call. I know it’s illegal, and that there are probably a million ways to get past *67 and wind up in jail. I do have a healthy respect for the law and admit that I am a little afraid of my local paper displaying a headline that reads: Former Teacher Jailed for Crank Calling Wal-Mart, but that doesn’t stop me. It’s a sickness.
My obsession with phone play began at the ripe old age of eight, the year my mother began to work outside of the home. Instead of coming home to cookies and milk at my own house, my new after school plan was to have a snack at my friend Laura’s house and hang out there until my mom or dad arrived home. I was delighted! Laura’s mom was a very cool psychotherapist who dressed in hippie clothes and didn’t make us do our homework the minute we finished our snack like my mom did. One day, after growing bored with roller skating in Laura’s driveway, we ended up in her mother’s downstairs sewing room. It was just a small, musty room with stacks of folded cloth, a rack filled with multi-colored thread, jars filled with buttons and an old Singer sewing machine. It seemed stuffy and boring until Laura showed me the green push button phone mounted elegantly on the wall. She informed me that it was a private line and asked me if I wanted to make some prank calls. Although it was my first time, Laura had an older brother and was a seasoned pro at cranking. In mere minutes we were scanning the skinny phonebook of our small town looking for our first victims. If your last name was Assweiner, Grossman, or Butts we called you. Once we ran out of interesting last names we started on the ‘A’s and went through nearly the entire phonebook. There were no lame classics in our repertoire like, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” we were much more creative than that, or so we thought. We had three main cranking themes. They were: “I’m Dating your Husband,” “ Radio Station WASS Giving you a Chance to Win a Date with Charlie’s Angels,” and “Little Girl Trapped at Pizza Hut Needs you to find Her Mommy.” I’ll use “I’m Dating Your Husband as an example of how our cranks usually went down:
Unwitting Victim: Hello
Me: (In my sexiest 8 year-old voice) Hi, I’m Natasha (a name I thought sounded super classy at the time) and I’m sorry to tell you that I’m dating your husband. (At this point Laura and I are snorting back giggles and nearly peeing our pants.)
Unwitting Victim: You G.D. kids stop playing on the phone! (Click)
Sometimes the victim was funnier than we were:
Unwitting Victim: Hello
Me: (trying even harder to sound sexy with my limited knowledge of sex) Hi, I’m Misty, (not a classy name, but it has its allure) I have big, big breasts (I only knew the proper names for body parts.) and I’m really, really sorry to inform you that I’ve been dating your husband.
Unwitting Victim: Well good for you, Misty. He’s an old asshole! You can have him! (Tons of honking laughter after that one!)
Our pranking went on for nearly an entire school year until I came up with the bright idea of calling Andy Gibb, the pop star that Laura and I were madly in love with. Tiger Beat magazine had long ago informed us that he had spent his childhood in Australia, so we decided there would be the perfect place to begin our quest. Little did we know that there was a charge for international directory assistance, as well as a very large fee for calling five people in Sydney with the surname Gibb. When the phone bill arrived, our after school game soon became doing yard work to pay Laura’s parents back.
After my punishment was complete, I soon found myself in a rigorous after-school tennis program. Yet despite my mother’s warnings of jail time and other wicked punishments for cranking, I still couldn’t quell the desire to hear those first few rings, to hear that innocent “hello” and to experience the first stifled snickers of my friends as they listened in. The phone was my drug, and I was its slave. As soon as I turned 13 and was old enough to watch my little brother after school, the cranking began again. Like any good addict, I taught my brother to make calls with me, that way I was assured in his not tattling to the parental units. My evil plot worked and we cranked our way through high school without getting caught. The summer after graduation, I left for my state’s university, tearfully handing our tattered phonebook over to my brother, making him promise to continue our sordid legacy.
You might think that the advent of college would mature me, and make pranking less enticing, but you would be thinking incorrectly. I was blessed with a roommate who was just as silly as I was, and one night while having a few friends over for drinks, we decided to make some prank calls. It was free to call any phone on campus so we each took turns calling different dorms. When it was my turn, my friend Kevin suggested I call a neighboring guys dorm and tell them I was a phone sex operator calling to see if I could provide any services. With four Pabst Blue Ribbons in my system, Kevin’s suggestion seemed the logical thing to do. Here’s my fuzzy recollection of that call:
Unwitting Dorm Guy: Hello
Me: (doing my fairly decent Marilyn Monroe imitation) Hello, this is Trixie. (Yes, I got the name from Speedracer.) I’m calling from the campus sex line to see if there’s anything at all that I can do for you, if you know what I mean. (Mind you, I’m still a gigantic virgin at the time of this call!)
Unwitting Dorm Guy: Our campus has a sex line?
Kevin: (butting in) Tell him you’ll toss his salad!
Me: Yes we have a really hot sex line, and (having NO idea what this means) I make a really, really good salad!
Unwitting Dorm Guy: You do?
Kevin: (butting in again) Tell him you want a Dirty Sanchez!
Me: (to Kevin) What’s that?
Unwitting Dorm Guy: Kevin? Is that you? Hey, is that Kevin Peters? Hey Kevin!
Me: Oh, Shit! (Click!)
Long story short: “Unwitting Dorm Guy” was, by a stroke of fate, one of Kevin’s friends. He, of course, wanted to meet the girl with the sexy voice. After Kevin assured him that I was basically a very good girl and not at all like my alter ego, Trixie, Kevin introduced us. “Unwitting Dorm Guy” eventually became my college boyfriend, my first husband and the father of my two daughters. Glean from my experience with prank calling any advice or cautioning that you wish. But, I will warn you, cranking is like heroin and I have an itchy dialing finger.
**Readers, I invite you to share your prank phone call stories in the comments section. (Yes, I do realize it’s my addiction asking you to do this!)
How Can I Complain? 
Two delightful articles in a row. I find it terrifically interesting and ironic that you have so much in common with both Edna Crabapple and Brat Simpson : )
Tee Hee! I think you’re right! “I’d like to speak to Al. Last name’s Coholic.” –That one’s my favorite of Bart’s!!
“Bart Simpson”. Rats!! I can’t seem to leave a comment without there being a dman typo in it. Arrg.
Well, Bart was d-man and he was also though of as kind of a Brat by a few grouchy moms who wouldn’t let their kids watch The Simpsons. He always seemed like a perfectly normal kid to me. It was that damned Lisa that got on my nerves. I made my kids cover their ears and close their eyes when she was on. Who wants their kid to emulate a know-it-all over acheiver? Not I!
Thanks for reading! 🙂
I have, over the years, received three or four vicious phone calls from adult strangers, designed to frighten me. But I don’t intimidate very easily. So in each instance, I went into my Dirty Harry’s psycho-bad-cop-partner persona. I managed to really scare the crap out of the perpetrators, I’m pleased to say.
Only one prank phone call comes to mind. It was from two girls, probably not much older than you and your friend. Well, turns out that I have a good sense of humor. It was also, as I recall, a dull day. So I was in the mood to shoot the breeze. I knew right off that it was a prank phone call, because I could hear the other girl giggling. Whatever it was they were calling about, I began chatting about it. Naturally, the conversation fizzled out pretty quickly, and ended with the girl signing off in a rather disappointed voice, “All right, Mr., you have a nice day, too.”
If I was on my toes, I could’ve done a Moe Schizlak impression, instead of ruining the fun of it for she and her friend—but I’m more alert when I’m under threat, so my inner Dirty Harry’s psycho-bad-cop-partner kicks in quicker than my inner Moe Schizlak.
~~~
BTW, I didn’t intentionally mis-spell damn. I caught the mis-spelling when I was proof reading it, and I thought, “Ahh, perfect. I’ll have to leave it like that.”
I had a friend whose mom kept a police whistle by the phone for prank callers. That was a woman who didn’t know how to appreciate a good time! I haven’t gotten a prank call in a long time, but when I do, I always play along, unless it’s totally vulgar!
I was certain that the “dman” was purposeful–very clever!
I suddenly feel remiss for never having made a single crank call in my life. Have I been missing out this whole time? Damn.
There’s still time! Your life doesn’t have to be this incomplete! Grab your phonebook and go for it! 🙂 Thanks for reading!
I was lame. I made a few prank calls when I was around 12 or 13 but then I stopped. I just felt guilty. I think my face even turned red while I was doing it. What can I say, I was deep in the Catholic guilt morass at that age! Good for you, though 🙂
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You made a great effort and you probably saved yourself from a disasterous marriage! See, Catholic guilt has its good points! 🙂
Here’s the link to a new web log I’m starting up.
http://literaturenotebook.wordpress.com/
Stop by when you can. I’m trying to learn how to write essays.
When I first set the web logs up that I have here on WordPress, I figured I would only be using WP to place my self-assigned homework. I changed my mind about that and decided to have an actual blog. Eventually, I’ll sort everything out. Until then, I’ll have to leave you the address’s link.
http://dononline.wordpress.com/
I just published my first official post. Tah-dah.
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I’ve never been a prank caller, ever, but I did get up to some sneaky shenanigans as a kid. I didn’t really feel like I was missing anything with the prank calling — and telephones and I have been lifelong enemies — but I didn’t realize you could get a hot date that way. 😀
Lol, you don’t know what you’re missing!! Thanks for visiting :)!
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Ok, your dialogue as Misty is the funniest thing I have ever read. EVER.
Why, thank you! 🙂 Also, thanks so much for visiting :)!
I love prank phone calling too! I met one of my first boyfriends through one. I was “Sexy Sylvia wearing three articles of clothing, pick a number between 1 and 3, and I will take something off for you”. :p
Also, a favorite when we were having sleepovers was to call the Tampax hotline and make up stories like, “I have three of them stuck inside of me! What do I do?” The operator who always seemed to answer the phone would get really mad at us and threaten to phone our parents.
These days (despite being in my 30s), I still get the itch. Sometimes, a friend and I will call random numbers and use Dr. Phil sound boards. Most people laugh at getting a call from him. Also, we will call dating lines where women are free. We will make up stories about being a brother and sister and tell the men on the line all kinds of gross things and ask if they want to come over and erm.. watch. You would be surprised how many say yes.
It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who enjoys this little hobby in my adulthood! Just don’t forget to dial *67 before you make your calls and you’ll be good to go! 🙂 Thanks for visiting! 🙂