Prank calls when you were a kid?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was listening to Weird Al, his song ‘Phony Calls’, parodying TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’, and it made me think of all the prank calls my friends and I used to make as kids. (I don’t think we ever did the fridge-running, or Prince-Albert-In-A-Can)

Favorites:

Us: Hello, is John there?
Them: I’m sorry, you have the wrong number
Us: Then what the hell do you pee in-a dixi cup?

Or the time a friend and I were dialing random numbers from a phone book, and we got this guy’s answering machine. So we left messages that sounded like those phone-sex ads on TV late at night. And then we left the numbers of two girls we hated.

What are your’s?

2

I can remember calling this older lady in my small community, name of Mildred. “Mil-DEW? Is that YOU?”, sort of lilting up with the voice. My parents even laughed.

3

I didn’t do a lot of prank calls, but there was a local number that would make a phone ring after you dialed it and then hung up. We would do that to payphones and then see if anyone picked them up.

4

I lived in a village where there was little entertainment. So as kids, to entertain ourselves, we used to look through the phone book for interesting names. There was an old guy in a town nearby who had a name that was a total gift to us. He was called “Mr Gotobed”.

So we used to call him about 11pm or midnight, and ask “are you still up?” If he replied in the affirmative, we would then shout “Well - go to bed!!!” and laugh until we pissed our pants.

Sigh.

Eventually we started drinking and taking drugs, which was much more entertaining.

5

We used to ask for Peter Wall (they would hopefully respond that Peter Wall didn’t live there) - we would then ask for Janet Wall (same response), Simon Wall, etc. Eventually, we’d ask “Aren’t there any Walls there?” (answer: “No, I…”), and we’d yell “Well what the hell is holding your roof up?”, then hang up and run.

6

Actually one of the best phone pranks (as opposed to calls) we did was to steal hundreds of bricks from a building site and fill the phone box with properly laid bricks, from top to bottom. We also did it with sacks of manure from the local farm, which was a bit meaner.

7

We used to do fake radio contests. Answer a trivia question and win a prize kind of thing.

8

Did you just stack them in loose, or did you use mortar too?

9

Loose. We were working in the dark, and weren’t that insane. By “laid” I mean layers, crossways, all the way up!

10

Oh man, we used to do that too. I remember the question we used. What year did the Mongols invade China? Nobody ever knew.

Not one that we gave, but one that we got. I was over at a friend of mine’s house, we must have been about 12 or so. The caller stated in a weird accent, “Your doooog is in myyyy gaaaarden.” And hang up. They dialed us back five or six times saying the same thing and getting progressively more agitated. On the last call, my friend’s mother was getting pretty tired of it, and shrieked, “We don’t have a DOG!”
The caller dropped the accent and said very matter of factly, “Oh. Well I don’t have a GARDEN!!”
Still cracks me up.

11

My ex-roommates – who were grad students in political science – used to prank call people. I was so embarrassed of them.

12

We used to like to get this one guy’s sister to call this guy named Mike Hunt and ask for him she never understood why we found that funny.

13

When I was young and impressionable, a co worker convinced me to call a rival rancher about some goats he was selling. I may or may not have had him convinced to load up all his goats onto a trailer, and bring them to the plaza so I could buy them, sight unseen. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it because the last thing I asked him (at the end of a 7 or 8 minute phone call) was if he breed the goats himself. When he answered yes, I told him he was a disgusting individual, and hung up.

I feel and felt really bad about it, but considering the guy who convinced me to make the call was twice my age, it makes it easier to dismiss.

14

I had three way calling, so I used to dial two random numbers and turn on “mute” so I could listen to the two callers argue about who called who. Mostly people were confused, but now and then I get some old person and it really made their day.

15

I did not make them but my brother was famous for them.

He used to record them so he could laugh at them later.

I can only remember one.

He called some older lady and through the confusion of the conversation she thought that he was her grandson. Some mundane conversation carried on for over ten minutes and then he asked to speak to grandpa.

“Your grandpa? Honey, your grandpas dead”

This caught my brother off guard and the only thing he could think to say was “oh, bummer”

It was cruel but at the time it was so funny. We played that tape back again and again.

16

Floating around the net somewhere is a recording like this. In the UK a radio station calls one Chinese restaurant and places an order for takeaway. Then they call another Chinese restaurant and get the first to read back the order and the second thinks the first is placing an order. Quite amusing.

17

Found it. I don’t normally type this, but: OMG LOL. That’s funny as fuck.

To continue the hijack, one of the best “professional” pranksters in the UK at the moment is Fonejacker (tons of his stuff on YouTube), one very funny guy who can do an amazing variety of accents and characters. His Nigerian scammer is my favourite.

18

Eighty six thousand Ugandan dollars. The ‘victim’ is brilliant.

To go back to the OP, I also used also to answer the phone with a (racist) stereotypical Chinese accent and say “Harro, Chinese takeaway and dog rescue, you bling dog, you take dog away in box with sweet and sour sauce and flied lice.” Invariably the voice would say something like “Yes… This is Professor Smith, could I speak to Dr. Jjimm’s Dad please?” and I would die of shame. Until the next time the phone rang…

The most spectacular one still weirds me out to this day, however. My mate Martin called a random number in the next town, about 1am, and when the irate person answered, he put on a pathetic adolescent voice, and said “Dad? It’s Chris. Can you come and pick me up?”

“Chris?” the guy answered.

“Yeah, dad.”

Here’s where it gets surreal.

The guy goes “Chris! Oh my god, we’re worried sick about you. Where are you? I’ll come and get you now.”

Martin, while completely surprised by this turn of events, had the composure to answer “I went to a party and someone gave me some pills, and now I don’t feel very well. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Where are you?!”

“I’m sitting in the street by the town hall.”

“Right, stay just where you are. I’m on my way.”

Martin started to fuck with him after that, and the guy eventually he realised it was a prank, and he fucking lost it, screaming obscenities and listing all the different ways he’d like to dismember Martin.

Martin went white and hung up. We had been listening in and were all pretty freaked out. No idea if there really was a Chris who was missing, or whether the guy was playing along all the time, but our pranking kind of fizzled out after that night.

The postscript to this is that when I got home, I called Martin and put on an approximation of the angry guy’s voice. “I’ve traced your fucking number you little fucking bastard, I know where you live, [then I gave Martin’s address] and I’m coming to get you.” Martin was pissing his pants with terror until I started giggling.

19

When I was in high school, we started a joke club called 'Friends don’t let friend’s drive with cod in their trousers." During the summers, we’d call random numbers and say something along the lines of

“Hi, this is Mary Ann with FDLFDWCTT. It’s our annual Cod awarness week. As you might now from TV news, the new trend among thrill seeking teenagers is to drive with cod in their trousers. This has caused a number of accidents, including three fatal ones in the month of April alone. We just want to get the word out and we hope that any parents out there talk to their kids about this dangerous practice.”

Most people laughed or got mad and hung up. But on guy said “Oh really? Well, I’m Amish so I wouldn’t know a lot about that, but I do know some teenagers, so I’ll go down and talk to them today.” We laughed for weeks about some Amish guy walking down to the local teens and warning them about the dangers of driving with fish in their pants.

A friend of mine called the same random person’s voice mail leaving a funny but incomprehensable messagee a couple times a year for TEN YEARS.

20

An Amish man had a telephone :confused:

Forgive my ignorance but uh…I didn’t think that Amish have phones.