Sunday, December 23, 2007

Confessions of a reformed phone prankster

My sister, Erin (not to be confused with this Erin), posted about her deceitful phone life. It reminds me of so many phone pranks of my youth. My excuse is that mine were in my youth. Nowadays I just tend to have a musical answering machine message.

Rachel, my youngest sister who's blog is private so I won't link to it, would get many MANY calls from her friends on a regular basis. They would call and say,

"Is Rachel there?"

And I would reply, "Yes, thanks for checking." Then I would promptly hang up.

Or,

"Is Rachel there?"
"Yes."
silence "Um, can I talk to her?"
"Can you?"
"May I please talk to her?"
"Yes, if you answer the following riddle correctly."
click.

Or we would answer in a strong British accent and then hear "click."

We used our very-similar-to-our-mom's-voice to our advantage and would excuse Rachel from school for an hour or so. Which reminds me of the times when we knew for sure when these recorded calls would come in:

"This is Pleasant Grove High School calling to inform you that your 10th grader missed one or more classes today..." and we'd get it before our parents so we could blackmail each other.

There are of course, the tried-and-true ones like:

Road-Kill Cafe. You kill it we grill it!

(With a cackle) Which witch would you like to speak to?

Gobble, gobble, gobble. Which turkey do you want to speak to?

My maiden name is difficult for tele-marketers to pronounce. So when they'd call and there was the tell-tale pause and then the request for Mr. or Mrs. mis-pronounced name, I would say, "Um... no one by that name lives here."

You were probably much more polite and cordial in your youth, right?

7 comments:

Leslie said...

I'm proud to say that to my memory I think Erin has only fooled me 2 times and I don't think you fooled me at all - probably because you start giggling sooner than Erin.

lizbit said...

I would say "more afraid of the phone".

Rach said...

I loved the "Top of the Temple Moroni Speaking!" Or how we used to leave the brady song for our answering machine.

Unknown said...

Yep, I liked the Brady song too.
Mom

i'm erin. said...

hahahaha...I AM THE WINNER, THE WINNER, THE WINNER, THE WINNER, THE WINNER, THE WINNER (insert video clip of me running around the home dancing gleefully).

Haddorkus said...

People can't seem to say my first or last name now, and just the other day I did the "no one by that name lives here thing" and ended the call. I love prank calls. Dan will answer in Italian every now and then or a weird accent but I can't do accents. I just listen as Dan does them, still, to his family.

jvjw said...

silly...the "man of the house" is the only one that does phone pranks here.