flanerie.org

I was highly entertained by this story about Steve Wozniak (tech-deity) in Wired:

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"Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.... After more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.

The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.

Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver was snatched up and slammed down.

Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep."

The children of America were making their first prank call.

And the person who answered the phone was Woz."

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This reminded me of long-forgotten episode...

Back in 1994 I was working for a software company. It was when I first got online - irc, bulletin boards, majordomo email lists and the NTSC browser. Such innocent days! Anyway, that's not important.

Six months into the job I started receiving calls intended for the local movie theatre. It was due to misdialling - the theatre had used a fairly random collection of digits and a local code rather than an easy to remember 800 number.

I was only getting 3-5 calls a day and with caller display I could see them coming. I either answered politely and explained their error or let the call go to voice mail.

It wasn't long before I got bored of that so I started giving out movie information.

"Movies around 7pm? Yes madam, we have Forest Gump at 6.50pm and Bambi meets Deepthroat at 7.05pm"

"There will be no movies this evening due to an infestation of fleas, but we will be open again tomorrow"

"Entrance fees? Adults £3.60, Children £2, Pensioners £2, men with beards £8"

I then moved on to answering the phone as a sex toy shop, an abattoir, 10 Downing Street and the Samaritans (an advice line for the depressed and troubled). Next was offensive shouting into the phone, and finally heavy breathing.

And then I got my number changed as a visit from the local police was becoming increasingly likely.