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From: zawada@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Paul J Zawada)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Telephone Humor & Insulation Testing
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Date: 16 Jul 90 03:55:21 GMT
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kitty!larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman):

> 	Reminds me of the "telephone pranks" friends and I used to
> pull while in college - like calling people at random, pretending to
> be from the telephone company, and asking them to place their
> telephone handset in a bucket because the telephone company was going
> to "purge moisture from the telephone cables."  A surprising number of
> people actually fell for this.  I digress, but the best one was
> pretending to be from the city sewer department, claiming that there
> was a sewer collapse, and asking people not to flush their toilet for
> 24 hours.  The clincher on this one was eliciting cooperation by
> stating: "Now we can't stop you from flushing your toilet, but think
> about us sewer workers below trying to fix the problem..." :-)

Reminds me of a story I heard about a radio station on the East Cost
 ... A disk jockey told his listeners that they should put plastic bags
over the ear piece on their handset.  This was because the phone
company was going to "blow the dirt out" of the phone lines with a
huge blast of air.  People actually started to do this until the phone
company protested to the station and demanded a retraction.  The next
day the disk jockey retracted the statement, saying that he was just
kidding. He went on to say that anybody who knew anything about
telephones knew they used a high vacuum to suck the dirt out ... Sigh.
(This is all from memory, so if anybody remembers this, please correct
any errors...)


Paul J Zawada                          |   zawada@ei.ecn.purdue.edu    
Titan P3 Workstation Support           |  ...!pur-ee!zawada
Purdue University Engineering Computer Network