Wow Phil, you was one bad boy! Glad I wasn't your friend back 
then.  We might have gotten into some big trouble together.  Were 
you one of those Blue Box guys? You don't have to answer that.  I 
was not.  73, Jim WA6EKS

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Phil Scovell <[log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Date sent: Tue, 21 Apr 2015 20:34:08 -0600
Subject: Before There Was Caller I D

School was out and to the best of my knowledge, this happened in 
68 or 69.
Two teenage blind friends of mine were talking on 75 sideband 
late at night;
probably about midnight or a little after.  My roommate from the 
school for
the blind was spending a few days with me in Omaha.  He lived in 
a small
town 35 miles west of me.  I was tuning around the band as my 
friend and I
were talking in my combination bedroom hamshack when I came 
across our two
buddies from school.  We sat and listened to them rag chewing for 
awhile and
then I got an idea.  Using my own private line my mom let me 
have, because I
was running a lot of phone patches, you understand, and because I 
simply was
able to talk my mom into it, I dialed one of the guy's home phone 
numbers,
letting it ring once, and then hanging up.  A minute or so later, 
I dialed
the other guy's number, letting it ring once, and then hanging 
up.  They
both commented on their phones ringing.  I did it again and then 
again.
Eventually, they figured out something was wrong so they took the 
phone off
the hook because, they said, they didn't want their parents to 
wake up.  A
few minutes later, they reported on the air that they were 
putting their
phones back on the hook so my finger, using a touch tone phone of 
all
things, dialed them up yet again.  Finally, they said they were 
leaving
their phones off the hook for the rest of the night.  Never once 
did they
put two and two together and my friend and I never told them what 
we had
done.  However, and this is the funny part, a couple days later, 
I was
talking to one of these guys and he said, "Man, did I screw 
something up big
time."  I asked him what he was talking about.  He told me about 
someone
ringing his phone in the middle of the night but he said, instead 
of taking
the phone off the hook for the rest of the night, he shorted the 
two phone
patch leads together which grounded out their phone.  He promptly 
forgot
about it.  The next day, the telephone company came and asked to 
check out
their phones and phone wiring because they had traced down a 
neighborhood
short to their house.  So my friend had shorted out an entire 
neighborhood.
No, are you crazy?  I never, to this day, told either one of my 
friends who
had dial their phone in the middle of the night; especially since 
one had
screwed up half the little town he was living in at that time.  
Don't you
tell anybody either.  Of course, that couldn't work as well today 
with
caller I D.  Oh, sure, you could block your call, I guess, but 
don't rain on
my parade.

Phil.
K0NX