The lost art of prank-calling strangers

Do you remember what it was like to be bored — like really bored? As a Gen Xer, I didn’t grow up scrolling social media or playing endless hours of “Minecraft” to keep me busy; instead, I spent a fair amount of my free time after school crafting the perfect prank call. Armed with an oversized White or Yellow Pages, a rotary phone and a close friend or two, we’d go from name to name, business to business raining terror on neighbors. In retrospect, it was time well spent.

Well, maybe. Some shenanigans may have gone too far. Friends ordered a few too many pizzas to a stranger’s house, or imposed endless verbal harassment on an overstressed father. It was a simpler time. Personally, my level of telephone mayhem never reached those heights of cruelty, but the endless hours of making or receiving prank calls in those pre-internet days became my coming-of-age story.

This way to pass the time actually dates back to the 1880s, just a few years after the phone was invented, and started with an undertaker, of all people, getting called to fetch the dead body of a not-so-dead woman. I guess once people had access to a phone, their true natures were revealed.

Around the same time, Bell Telephone hired teenage boys to work as switchboard operators — an obvious recipe for disaster. Sure enough, the boys began to connect and disconnect people’s calls simply for their own amusement. There’s just something about being a kid and having a telephone and a little bit of power.

It seems unimaginable now to get together with a friend and spend an afternoon calling people just to put on funny voices or shout one-liners and hang up. As I think back on it with distance and some level of maturity, I realize the absurdity of it all. But I imagine these precious moments were not based on malice — it was just a way to entertain ourselves until dinner.

Prank calls forced you to learn how to improvise. While one friend may have had an idea of a canned joke or line they wanted to try, in the end, you had to ad lib what was said depending on who answered — and you had to be prepared for anything. Although most of the time it was a corny joke — “is your refrigerator running?” is a classic — something about the idea of an oblivious adult paging “Dick Hertz” could induce a belly laugh so intense, it actually hurt.

Once I reached puberty, the majority of our prank calls were spent dialing up the boys we liked (or the girls we didn’t). I was careful not to call too often, but the idea that from the confines of my doll-house-decorated bedroom, sitting on my princess canopy bed, I could maybe, just maybe, hear the breath of my teenage obsession filled me with glee. Unfortunately, this was rarely the case; most times, their parents would answer and I would hang up loudly and quickly.

Another genre altogether was the crank call, a more nefarious and in some cases illegal form of mayhem me and my besties concocted. These were the early scripts and hijinks of comedians. In a way, it was to us what TikTok is to Gen Alpha — the opportunity to put on a sultry voice or mimic an old woman depending on the audience. Like anything, our pranks revolved around the zeitgeist of the time. What started with a desperate call to the town undertaker evolved into teens spending hours dialing 867-5309 and asking for “Jenny,” in accordance with the popular ’80s song — an unfortunate coincidence for anyone who had the number.

Today, our handheld devices can tell us the names of just about anyone calling, or let us know if “Scam Likely” is on the other end. People block unwanted numbers, and no one under 30 has heard of the White Pages. Pranks have turned into memes and other visual online jokes that barely involve active communication. No Grubhub driver is showing up with a dozen pizzas that aren’t paid for. The jig is up. And maybe that’s OK. Teenagers have new ways to socialize now.

But man, I sure do miss the innocence of the prank calls and the friends I made while we inundated the town with our juvenile assaults. The way my voice would change when someone answered, and the endless laughter. That all stopped once the dreaded *69 was invented, and with just three buttons people could discover who was on the other end of the line.

Armed with cellphones and endless devices now, we can instantly distract or entertain ourselves for hours on end. And in some ways, that’s sad. Those moments with little to do forced us latchkey kids to express ourselves, even if we were shy. I’d go so far as to say that for many professional entertainers, it was an informal first audition — memorizing lines, becoming someone else, learning how to come up with a retort on the spot. It wasn’t about getting punked or embarrassing someone — not entirely, at least — but about being with your friends, killing time and doing something that got your adrenaline pumping, if only for a few seconds.

The whole point was a bunch of kids setting out on a verbal expedition to use the telephone as a megaphone to have our voices heard. And that we did — better than starting a podcast.

Elana Rabinowitz is an ESL teacher and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and elsewhere.