Aw c’mon now, if you’re gonna say that, be fair and give us an example 
Some middle school kids that the caller id blocking thing makes it okay to prank calls.
My son got a few of them 2 or 3 years ago. They were mostly calls telling him he was going to hell and that he was a devil worshipper (because he’d self-identified as agnostic or maybe athiest) but when the callers started telling him they were coming over to our house to “stick their dick up his little sister’s ass” rather than just calling her a retard or a douchebag (our daughter is completely non-verbal due to autism and we tend to be rather protective of her), I had to involve the police in getting the calls to stop.
I just printed up a copy of the online record of all the calls our son had recieved and handed that over. A week later, I’d managed to get the boy’s Mother cell phone number…and gave that to the police just after the prakster called again.
I heard his little world ended that day.
The Customers Suck site is full of posts on prank calling kids. The demented callers are more numerous though.
My brother and his friend used to prank call late-night radio talk shows. I think there was some sort of dating show they called a lot, and maybe some political shows. IIRC they would tape themselves and listen to their “greatest hits” all the time. I thought it was an awful and scary thing to do so I never listened.
One night I was closing at the movie theater I used to work at. Me and the other manager had finished all the paperwork and were basically just sitting around waiting for the last movie to finish so we could leave. Then the phone rings. I pick up, and it’s someone using a soundboard (Special Ed from the TV show Crank Yankers). I let them go on for a couple minutes, and hang up… and a few minutes later they call back. The other manager has a go, and hangs up…and a few minutes later, they call back again. So I find the soundboard they’re using, and basically repeat what they say right back to them until they finally got bored.
A lot of businesses don’t bother with caller ID since it’s policy to answer every phone call anyway.
I used to work at a music store. Our number was 1 digit off from a hardware store. I used to get calls about all kinds of hardware stuff (even AFTER I answered with the name of the music store). One day, I got tired of it - someone called asking about garden hoses and I told them we had them for .10 per foot, etc…
It wasn’t directly prank-calling the “victims”, but back in the mid-'80s my sister and I (both in grade school at the time) would call a 800 number for some teen-girls club* and sign up male “victims” by the feminine version of their first name. We wouldn’t be there when they’d get the membership packet for “Josephina” or “Wilhelmina” but at the time we were sufficiently amused by the call itself, by the knowledge that they’d be getting the packet.
Even back in the '80s, we did this exclusively from a payphone at the public park several blocks from home.
*Eva Joia – just Googled it and found out it was a “fan club” for a line of clothing for teenage girls.
I had one a while back. The classic Is Your Refrigerator running? I played along.
I’m no judge, but the kid seemed really young and I figured his older brother put him up to it. (Based on all the trouble my older brother got me into.)
My grandparent’s phone number was two digits transposed from a local public golf course.Some people would insist they had the correct number, so I’d cheerfully take a reservation for a tee time. Only years later did I realize I was probably making life hell for the golf course people. If these people were dicks and insisting to a child that they had the right phone number, they were probably assholes to the golf course personnel that were telling them they had no reservation.
In college we used to call various TV preacher’s 800 numbers and give big donations with made up credit card numbers. We were trying to see if they’d ring the big bell they’d ring after hitting some milestone, but they never did. We also tried to pull the same trick on PBS during a pledge drive, but they asked too many questions for a bunch of drunks to answer convincingly and hung up on us.
Occasionally my buddy and I would order pizza for the neighbours, that’s about it, though.
3 years ago when I was 15, I got my ass kicked over a prank call. Not since.
What’d you do?
Back in the back in the day, when you’d pay extra for “Tone” service on your phone, a friend had a job cleaning a local “transfer-station” type of phone company building. It had banks and banks of relay things, all clicking away with the old click-style 1300mHz system. There was this phone handset with a 1/4" jack on the end that you simply plugged into any active phone line, and you were “there.”
We’d listen, make cow noises, comments, and all kinds of shit, and 'bout piss ourselves doing it. People would get pissed and say they were going to call the phone company, and we’d say “We are the phone company!” Sometimes we’d act like “the lines must have got crossed, how strange”, and then start conversations with people. Sometimes we say “ok, I’ll try hanging up and redialing”, then go silent for a few minutes, then the fuckers would start whipspering to eachother, like we were all in one big room or something, we’d let em go until they thought the coast was clear and then we’d “No, man, I can still hear you. What else is going on?”
Those were the days, my friend, we though they’d never f-in end.
Word.
I had a marketing service call my work the other day trying to sell us their web services (make us a website, put us in the yellow pages, etc.). I kept him on the phone for an hour and a half because I kept on needing to clear things with my boss. I also invented a new company name (he was clearly just calling numbers down a list) and we made cakes. Cakes for all occasions- and I just kept getting more obscene and descriptive with what we could put on the cake. Naked people, deer heads, zombie guts, cakes that bleed which of course are big with the Twilight crowd… He was going to send out a photographer in order to take pictures of our cakes for the website. I could just imagine the commission he imagined he was going to pull in- I forgot about him for about 5 minutes twice but he still was on the line when I picked the receiver back up. And then I confessed to him that he had just called a pay phone at the mall.
But you are going to get it from me in one way or another if you call the fax number with blocked caller ID. (I got into a heated argument with a magazine subscription woman on the phone once because she wanted to sell us magazine for our waiting room so I blamed her for making me wait in the doctor’s and dentist’s offices as they needed me to read the magazines to make sure they got their money’s worth.) I don’t even try to disguise what I am doing and can’t figure out why people don’t hang up sooner.
I remember once I was sleeping over a friend’s house and we were calling random numbers and got some guy’s answering machine. So we left messages that sounded like phone sex ads (oh, I’m soooooo horny for you baby, oh oh oh!!!), and then gave the numbers of these two girls we didn’t like.
My little brother, always the “bad” child of the two of us, had a prank calling experience. It was just after “The Ring” had come out, so he called a random number and got the answering machine. He left the message “You will die in seven days!” in a scary voice, and hung up. A few hours later, the police are at our door. “Do you have a son?” He asked, and my mom locked onto my brother with that waaayy pissed off mom look. (We’ve all seen it. ) Apparently the people were an old couple who had not seen “The Ring”, and were concerned enough about the message to call the cops. Needless to say, he was in some deep sh*t!
We would call people and ask them if their street light was burning. They’d go look out the window and would say “yes”. Then we’d say “go blow it out”.
Also, we’d call a cemetery and ask for someone. We’d get “he ain’t here yet”.
I work at a call center. I can guarantee you 100% that kids still prank call. We got caller ID recently, but it’s not like we can block them or anything. Of course, now the easiest way to end a prank call is to say “And I see here your number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.” They usually hang up pretty quickly.
I know someone who did make some calls. They traced them and now they have to appear in juvenile court.
The worse thing I ever did on the phone was: “Hi there. Did you know your phone number spells (555) UBLOW ME” and other similar phrases.
Dad caught me once and I got grounded lol.
I have girls so I don’t think it would cross their minds - hopefully.