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
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