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Phone Phreaky
Jan. 14th, 2007 03:17 pmYesterday, somehow, I managed to make a haircut interesting. Today, let's move onto something really exciting- the telephone.
The semi-inspirational news for this comes from this rather bizarro business story:
Cingular to be rebranded as AT&T, following multimillion-dollar marketing to rebrand AT&T as Cingular
So yeah. The Phone Company (TPC, to fans of the movie The President's Analyst), which shocked my early adulthood by being forcibly broken up into little companies, is once again reforming itself like Robert Patrick's liquid-metal Terminator in T2, now even reclaiming its old Monopoly-money name.
I've long had a fascination for that black phone on the desk, going back as I do to the days when it was on the desk, it was black, it had a dial and a hardwire connection into the wall, and someone named Ma Bell owned that phone, its hardwire connection, and probably the wall. Ma Bell charged you rent on it every month of your life, cost you a mint every time you made a long-distance call, but always sent a large burly serviceman to your home whenever anything broke. (That last part's a quote from Lily Tomlin, who added, "I'd advise you to lock up the liquor; he's a mean drunk.")
Not that I was ever that much of a talker, given that talking cost so damn much. Playing, on the other hand, was free or inexpensive. It was in elementary school that one of the usual Weisenheimers (Izzy, I think) discovered a repairman's trick used by Ma Bell at the time: if you dialed 660, waited for a second dial tone, dialed 6 and hung up the phone, it would ring in your own house. This information could prove useful for all sorts of innovation involving the hoodwinking of the grownups: "calls" from school about an emergency review class you had to go back to school to attend (heh), or from church announcing that confirmation class had been cancelled (heh heh). The only problem was, occasionally the ringback feature would continue after the initial pickup and hangup, so you always ran the risk of getting caught at use of this trick. Fortunately, my mother, likely to be the only one around at those times, wouldn't have understood the truth if I'd told her, so she never really caught on.
----
By junior high, I discovered another strange phone-omenon. A New York City radio station was popular with Us Kids back then, WPIX-FM, and while some of the stations in town had already gone to special heavy-duty equipment for their contest and request lines (I think they started with 955), PIX's was just an ordinary Manhattan exchange. The line nonetheless got a lot of calls, especially on request-and-dedication portions of shows.
Almost invariably, you'd get a busy signal, but that's where the fun began. People all over the area discovered that in between the bee-beep-beep of the busy signal, they could all hear each other, and talk to each other. Bear in mind, this was 1973; the internet consisted of six mainframe computers connecting five universities and the Pentagon; there was no such thing as a chat line; and to a dysfunctional bunch of teenagers, this was the coolest thing you could imagine. All, mind you, interspersed by rather loud beeps. One voice I can still remember as a regular was some kid in Bay Ridge who, every night it seemed, would get on that "party line" and trawl for dates with [BEEP]"Who [BEEP] lives [BEEP] in [BEEP] Brooklyn?"
I actually dated a girl from Valley Stream I met through this thing. Once.
----
By then, though, I'd become older and far more mature (heh heh heh). For one thing, Imus had come out with an album of crank calls, which I took the time not only to memorize but to implement. So occasionally, a Hardees in Hempstead would get a call from the Air Force ordering 1200 hamburgers (to go), or a Hertz Rent-a-Car in Indianapolis would get a toll-free call asking to rent a Shelby 350 on Memorial Day weekend (and asking them to put in a roll bar), or the one I've used this very century (and at least two Friends of this page can prove it), calling a Boston hotel, asking if they found a pair of glasses and, um, an entire suit of clothes in the lobby, and asking them to ring Mr. C. Kent's room if they turned up.
The fun wasn't limited to outbound calls, either. After confirmation, I started spending a lot more time in church voluntarily, as this is where many of the Christian Weisenheimer kids turned up by the time I reached high school age. The church office was my first experience with a multi-line phone, which in that primitive prehistoric way had two incoming lines (one the office's number, the other the parsonage number which also rang there) and one line for outgoing calls. The only calls that would logically come in on the outgoing line were wrong numbers.
Even worse, we knew whose they were. The local Eastern Airlines reservations number was one digit off.
Jimmy Lindberg was our reservations supervisor. In fairness, he always told customers to call and reconfirm those reservations before the end of the day, and Eastern's long out of business so I doubt they can do anything about us now.
----
By the time I got to college, I found other ways of occupying my spare time. Legal drinking age does tend to help with that. Nowadays, I have little chance to do any good punking in this way, but on those many occasions where someone calls one of my 18 different phone numbers, is told they misdialed, and calls right back? I'm always tempted to return to my roots and connect them, confirm them, and even better do something that will cost them.
But That Would Be Wrong. Heh heh heh heh.
The semi-inspirational news for this comes from this rather bizarro business story:
Cingular to be rebranded as AT&T, following multimillion-dollar marketing to rebrand AT&T as Cingular
So yeah. The Phone Company (TPC, to fans of the movie The President's Analyst), which shocked my early adulthood by being forcibly broken up into little companies, is once again reforming itself like Robert Patrick's liquid-metal Terminator in T2, now even reclaiming its old Monopoly-money name.
I've long had a fascination for that black phone on the desk, going back as I do to the days when it was on the desk, it was black, it had a dial and a hardwire connection into the wall, and someone named Ma Bell owned that phone, its hardwire connection, and probably the wall. Ma Bell charged you rent on it every month of your life, cost you a mint every time you made a long-distance call, but always sent a large burly serviceman to your home whenever anything broke. (That last part's a quote from Lily Tomlin, who added, "I'd advise you to lock up the liquor; he's a mean drunk.")
Not that I was ever that much of a talker, given that talking cost so damn much. Playing, on the other hand, was free or inexpensive. It was in elementary school that one of the usual Weisenheimers (Izzy, I think) discovered a repairman's trick used by Ma Bell at the time: if you dialed 660, waited for a second dial tone, dialed 6 and hung up the phone, it would ring in your own house. This information could prove useful for all sorts of innovation involving the hoodwinking of the grownups: "calls" from school about an emergency review class you had to go back to school to attend (heh), or from church announcing that confirmation class had been cancelled (heh heh). The only problem was, occasionally the ringback feature would continue after the initial pickup and hangup, so you always ran the risk of getting caught at use of this trick. Fortunately, my mother, likely to be the only one around at those times, wouldn't have understood the truth if I'd told her, so she never really caught on.
----
By junior high, I discovered another strange phone-omenon. A New York City radio station was popular with Us Kids back then, WPIX-FM, and while some of the stations in town had already gone to special heavy-duty equipment for their contest and request lines (I think they started with 955), PIX's was just an ordinary Manhattan exchange. The line nonetheless got a lot of calls, especially on request-and-dedication portions of shows.
Almost invariably, you'd get a busy signal, but that's where the fun began. People all over the area discovered that in between the bee-beep-beep of the busy signal, they could all hear each other, and talk to each other. Bear in mind, this was 1973; the internet consisted of six mainframe computers connecting five universities and the Pentagon; there was no such thing as a chat line; and to a dysfunctional bunch of teenagers, this was the coolest thing you could imagine. All, mind you, interspersed by rather loud beeps. One voice I can still remember as a regular was some kid in Bay Ridge who, every night it seemed, would get on that "party line" and trawl for dates with [BEEP]"Who [BEEP] lives [BEEP] in [BEEP] Brooklyn?"
I actually dated a girl from Valley Stream I met through this thing. Once.
----
By then, though, I'd become older and far more mature (heh heh heh). For one thing, Imus had come out with an album of crank calls, which I took the time not only to memorize but to implement. So occasionally, a Hardees in Hempstead would get a call from the Air Force ordering 1200 hamburgers (to go), or a Hertz Rent-a-Car in Indianapolis would get a toll-free call asking to rent a Shelby 350 on Memorial Day weekend (and asking them to put in a roll bar), or the one I've used this very century (and at least two Friends of this page can prove it), calling a Boston hotel, asking if they found a pair of glasses and, um, an entire suit of clothes in the lobby, and asking them to ring Mr. C. Kent's room if they turned up.
The fun wasn't limited to outbound calls, either. After confirmation, I started spending a lot more time in church voluntarily, as this is where many of the Christian Weisenheimer kids turned up by the time I reached high school age. The church office was my first experience with a multi-line phone, which in that primitive prehistoric way had two incoming lines (one the office's number, the other the parsonage number which also rang there) and one line for outgoing calls. The only calls that would logically come in on the outgoing line were wrong numbers.
Even worse, we knew whose they were. The local Eastern Airlines reservations number was one digit off.
Jimmy Lindberg was our reservations supervisor. In fairness, he always told customers to call and reconfirm those reservations before the end of the day, and Eastern's long out of business so I doubt they can do anything about us now.
----
By the time I got to college, I found other ways of occupying my spare time. Legal drinking age does tend to help with that. Nowadays, I have little chance to do any good punking in this way, but on those many occasions where someone calls one of my 18 different phone numbers, is told they misdialed, and calls right back? I'm always tempted to return to my roots and connect them, confirm them, and even better do something that will cost them.
But That Would Be Wrong. Heh heh heh heh.
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