The vanishing, underappreciated prank call | Hacker News Reader

The vanishing, underappreciated prank call

bostonglobe.com

41 pointsluu32 comments

What the OP may call "lighthearted", "chasing a high", and "an unexpected education" I call "No. Don't do it."

I'm not speaking as the recipient here. I'm speaking as someone who was hauled in front of the police because what I considered "lighthearted" had scared the hell out of an unsuspecting (albeit naive) family. While I was giggling at a random number, they were worried that someone had selected them for abuse and a knock on the door was next.

The OP makes the comparison to trolling, and determines trolling is worse because of the "raw anonymity". I would suspect most people would prefer that anonymity over the "intimacy" of having an anonymous voice on the other end of your phone line making similar accusations or hurling profanities.

Hilarious as some prank calls genuinely are, they weren't really acceptable then. And they aren't now.

Ah yes, how sad that it is harder than ever to abuse communication networks to sow distrust and anger. Thanks to better filters and a movement toward identifying users, most of us are less bothered by bad actors than we've ever been.

What surprises me most is the author's lack of contrition. I forgive people for past mistakes, but she still fondly remembers how she made others' lives hell. Fortunately, the Internet also remembers. People who google "Kate Levin" will probably find this article. If they're like me, they'll be a little less likely to associate with her.

You seem fun.

You don't.

He sounds like someone who doesn't want to be annoyed by people calling to make stupid prank phone calls at all hours of the day. I'm also one of those people. So sue me.

Is that you Mrs McConigle?

Its not gone! I have a home phone delivered along with our cable tv that we've never used for anything. It rings three or for times per day with some random sales spam.

I answer in German sometimes. Sometimes I demand in a hushed tone to know how they got this number, secret agent style. Other times I pretend to be the most excited person in the world about whatever scammy schlock they're slinging. Once or twice, I've claimed to be the family dog, keeping my communication skills a secret from "the masters" and looking for a way out of the house. My kids laugh. My wife loves it. Every ring a fresh new opportunity.

Do not call list? Hardly. A tiny sliver of my adolescence lives on.

Thanks, I think I shall start answering the phone as "Reactor Control Room, Torness Nuclear Power Station".

I even got a spam sales phone call from a company offering devices to prevent spam sales phone calls...

Due to various (business) reasons it was easier/cheaper to get the stupid bundled land line with cable tv.

I had so much spam on that line that I changed my recorded message to the three tones with the "We're sorry. The call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try your call again." message. After about a month all the spam stopped.

Couldn't you just not attach anything to the line?

The "Windows Technical Support" people have found my number and they'll call me a couple of times a month.

"Please sir, run the program regedit.exe" "Where do I find that on my Mac, again?"

When they call me, I always seem to have a Commodore 64.

Search for Tom Mabe's pranks. He, like you, has tremendous fun with telemarketers.

Prank calls were a lot of fun. I especially like this one: select a number, call them once a day, asking "Hi, is Jack home?" After six days or so, call again, saying "Hi, this is Jack, has anyone called for me?"

I don't think messing with strangers is a particularly good idea. This situation outlines why pretty clearly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jacintha_Saldanha

It seems like the more relevant factors are: the nurse's personal history, workplace issues, a targeted call, a high-profile target, and broadcasting a recording of the call. Not to say standard, random prank-calling is OK, but it's not quite comparable.

On related notes, it's interesting that the author of OP says, "Just last summer, someone called me and claimed to be holding my brother at gunpoint. The ringing of my phone startled me for days to come." She also regrets making a mean-spirited call to her math teacher. Yet she does not seem to regret prank-calling in general.

The linked prank call is a sad case. It's the kind of call that I would have said was harmless before it happened.

The callers thought that they were being ridiculous - they thought that their accents and use of language and so on were so obviously daft that they had no idea they would actually get as far as they did. They thoguht they'd call, say some silly things, and have people laugh at them for being so inept at impersonating royalty.

Tragically, working for the modern NHS is for many people a stressful unpleasant experience with a lot of management and bureaucracy.

This is the first I'd heard of it, being an American (if that's an OK excuse.) It is sad, and also would have seemed relatively harmless beforehand to me.

To change from my original tone a bit, perhaps it is best to generalize the idea, that having fun at a stranger's confusion, behind the anonymity of a phone, is just too cruel and dangerous. You can't know what's going on in the lives of the people you call, and the consequences move out of your control when you hang up.

It was big in the media in Aus and the UK, but no real reason for it to be in the US. Radio prank calls are always painfully unfunny and usually humiliating. In this case the humiliation hit a person who was mentally ill and stressed.

The fallout here in Australia was utterly predictable; contrite and teary disc jockeys, people baying for their blood, current affairs shows doing segments left, right, and center. Equally predictably, the hospital was trying to shift responsibility for improperly managing patient privacy.

The annoying thing is that it took someone's death to show just how humiliating and terrifying being on the receiving end of these things is.

The nurse referred to in the linked prank call was working in a private hospital, not the NHS. I agree with your comment though.

Ah, right, thanks for the clarification.

No, that's not the case. They had a large staff meeting, and at least one of the radio announcers expressed misgivings. These were completely ignored. It was an absolute travesty what happened next. The female DJ's career has ended, whilst the male DJ's career has bloomed.

I note this is the station that had a massive boycott due to one announcers finally going too far. You might want to look up "Sack Vile Kyle". [1]

There is no doubt that 2DayFM we're hoping for massive shock and outrage. That is their modes operandi.

1. http://sackvilekyle.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/vile-kyle-bad-be...

It's not so easy to use "person X, who had attempted suicide multiple times, left a note blaming her successful suicide on a prank played on her three days prior" to conclude that the problem was the prank. What do you think the odds are that she would have killed herself anyway?

Just to be clear, I don't endorse prank calling at all; I'm glad it's a dying "art". But the death of Jacintha Saldanha isn't evidence for anything more than "people who are determined to mess up their own lives, can".

The point is not that "prank calls kill people". The point is that you do not know the situation of the person you are calling and even these simple fun calls can cause an undue amount of distress or anxiety. Since the benefit is minimal the risks seem to outweigh them.

And I'm pointing out that the risk here isn't "person who otherwise would have lived dies", although people seem to want to treat it that way. It's "extremely fragile person, already on suicide watch, makes yet another suicide attempt". That's not a large risk, it's a small one.

I used to have a radio show in high school. Not only did the high school let a bunch of kids broadcast basically anything they wanted to the public at large - they ALSO had a TELEPHONE hooked up, so that you could place calls, live! (They also had a 7-second delay, with a "dump button" just in case a bad word slipped out)

We used to call the Burger King customer service 800 number. Every week. We'd complain about Big Macs, and other silly things. Nothing harmful. They eventually got wise to our antics and everyone working there was told not to talk to those kids calling between 11am and 2pm on saturdays.

The 800 operator was also very useful: 800 555 1212 - a directory of all toll-free numbers. Once we just made up a 3-letter acronym, got the 800 number for it, and called them. Some guy answered. We asked him what the 3 letters stand for. "Nothing," he said. "They used to stand for something but they don't, anymore." It was a strange kind of existential conversation.

Oh yes, those were fun times.

Pranking is a lot more of a niche now than it ever was, but it's still alive. For some unholy reason PLA is still around: http://www.phonelosers.org/

My favorite pranks were on confs with other loser kids from IRC, usually calling up either a business support line and trolling them with unsolveable product bugs, or something more esoteric, like calling up a sexual assault line and asking what counted as sexual assault, or an STD prevention hotline asking about strange maladies. Invariably someone else would hop on the line and make the whole thing into a soap opera for the poor abused call center monkey.

If there's not that many pranks anymore it's probably because kids are finding new ways to deal with boredom.

"For people who’ve been on the wrong end, the death of the prank call would come as a relief. I know how they feel: Just last summer, someone called me and claimed to be holding my brother at gunpoint."

So is it dead or is it not?

Swapping replaced the traditional prank call

I think you mean Swatting, which a good reminder of just how insane the US has become.

Who needs prank calls when we can troll the comments sections of news websites.

Wubba lubba dub dub!

Plus... honestly: "underappreciated prank calls". You gonna talk about some ancient childish nuisance behavior as if it's a red book animal species worth protecting?

Jesus, nostalgia is a powerful reality distortion field. Next thing, people might start talking about how scratched dusty vinyl records sound better than lossless digital audio.

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