So, directly across the street from my house, there were two pay phones. You could call them, but they wouldn’t ring out loud.
I had both of them on speed dial and when someone would pull up I’d hit one of the two buttons and hope I got the right one. When I did, I’d prank the person. Usually it was just standard. “911, what’s your emergency?” “Oh! I, uh, I’m on a pay phone. I didn’t mean to call the 911.” “SIR! We get prank calls from this number constantly. You stay where you are! An officer will be there to file a report. If leave, you risk being arrested. The owner of the store has a camera on that phone and we will find you!”
They’d wait around sometimes. Most of the time they’d leave. My friends and I would be on the floor laughing.
As fun as that was, nothing ever topped this one.
A girl pulled up to the phone in the middle of the night and tried to make a call. I hit the speed dial button but I got the wrong one. She left the phone, walked over to the side of the store, pulled her pants down and pissed on the side of the building. I dialed the phone she was previously on and prayed she’d pick it up again. She did! I heard her dial a number, and I started breathing heavy on the phone. She said, “Hello, someone on there?” I replied in a deep, growly voice, “Hey. You forgot to wipe.”
She slammed the phone on the receiver, looked around frantically, and hopped in her car and peeled out.
My brother laughed like a damn donkey and nearly passed out. I couldn’t breathe laughing because of how hard he was laughing. It truly was an amazing moment in my life.
Which, looking at it from a 21st century perspective I’d be terrified if someone just put my god damn address in a book most people kept lying around. I’m still pissed at Snapchat for sharing my live gps location with my contacts.
They only had the numbers of local people and the phone book would just give you name, address and phone number. If you’re the Terminator and there happen to be 3 Sarah Connors in the phone book, too bad, you’ve got to visit all 3 of them. You could ask to have your number unlisted and many people did, particularly celebrities. Nobody had an on-line presence so the only way people would even know the name of most people was if you told them.
I remember having a lesson in middle school on how to use a phone book. The information came in handy quite a few times once I hit a job but I think phone books started dying out in the mid 2000s.
Yeah if that movie was made in modern times, Sarah Connor’s roommate would have tagged her in some thirst-trap pics on Instagram with geotagging trackers. She’d never stand a chance.
It wasn’t that, mass doxxing is still very easy, its just pay for play now. You know those random apps that (used to, mostly) ask for contact permissions? They’d send your entire address book to their servers, with the name and number of all your contacts. Now you pay per number to get a name from a phone number, or a number from a name.
Used to be that you paid to be unlisted and everyone was listed by default. This was necessary in the era of landline phones. If you really needed to get a hold of someone, it wasn’t uncommon to need to go through a call chain until you got through to them. Now that everyone has a phone in their pocket with their own number (not same number for each family) that’s no longer the norm.
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