When I was a kid, there was this great phenomenon known as
prank calls. That was when someone called your home phone, and they’d say
something silly, or something rude, or they’d ask you a dumb, insulting
question, or maybe they’d just breathe hard on the line in a suggestive or
threatening manner. P{rank calls were the bane of many parents and adults in
general, but for us kids back then, they were almost always fun, because we
always knew it was just some other bored teenager doing it, and we could relate
to that.
I remember a prank called calling a friend of mine and
asking him: “Are you naked? Heh, heh, heh!” And my friend answered: “Underneath
my clothes I am! Want to see?” And those kinds of things everyone my age and
older pretty much always remember fondly. Maybe our parents didn’t appreciate
it, but we did.
So today, where we all get marketing spam calls all the
time, and so often the caller ID says: “Unavailable”, shouldn’t there be one
designated: “Prank Call” so that we can receive a prank call if we’re bored and
want one, and we promise not to tell on them? Surely there must be some unused
area code for prank calls nationwide, just like Hollywood movies have the 555
prefix. Then we could choose to accept them or refuse them, depending on our
mood. And it wouldn’t cost us any minutes or data: the prankster would pay for
that.
