{"id":508,"date":"2007-08-28T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-28T17:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2007\/08\/28\/the-lost-art-of-the-crank-call"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:36:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:36:32","slug":"the-lost-art-of-the-crank-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/the-lost-art-of-the-crank-call\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Art of the Crank Call"},"content":{"rendered":"

In these times of strife and tumult, I lament the fact that my own children are growing up in a world where caller ID has effectively destroyed the art of the prank phone call.<\/p>\n

We called them \u201ccrank calls,\u201d although \u201cprank\u201d is a more accurate but less alliterative description. I began with the old standards: \u201cIs your refrigerator running?\u201d and \u201cDo you have Prince Albert in a can?\u201d (It was years later when I finally learned that Prince Albert is a chewing tobacco. This call was usually less than successful, but crank call etiquette demanded that you at least make the attempt.)<\/p>\n

I was satisfied with my Prince Albert-level crank skills until about the 6th grade, when I met An Esteemed Colleague who showed me the true potential for the havoc you could wreak with a simple phone call. Under his expert tutelage, I helped My Esteemed Colleague hound an innocent man into utter madness, ultimately destroying him \u2013 or, at least, forcing him to change his phone number.<\/p>\n

His crime? He answered the phone with a cheerful \u201cHowwwwdy!\u201d It was funny.<\/p>\n

We called him Joe Howdy. We never spoke when we called, although My Esteemed Colleague once taped Joe Howdy and played his own words back to him, so that he could say \u201cHowwwdy!\u201d to himself. High comedy. When Joe finally changed his number after we had called him umpteen times and hung up, we combed the phone book trying to find out what the new number was. The problem was that he wasn\u2019t listed as Joe Howdy, so we had to find his number, match it with his real name, and then call information to find out what it was. We even tried calling information to backwards engineer the process, yet no operator was willing to tell us the name of a person if we could only provide a phone number. We\u2019re lucky we weren\u2019t slapped with a restraining order.<\/p>\n

Our other methods were less harassing. My Esteemed Colleague would call people and tell them there was a problem with their phone system and demand that they scream their phone numbers into the receiver to calibrate the sound. Other times, he would call and ask if the household received their gift subscription to Reader\u2019s Digest. If they hadn\u2019t, My Esteemed Colleague would profusely apologize. Then, to make sure they didn\u2019t miss out on the latest issue, he would read it to them over the phone until they got bored and hung up.<\/p>\n

As phone technology improved, so did the crank calling methods. Conference calling allowed us to call two random people simultaneously and listen in as they argued between themselves, sometimes fiercely, as to who called whom. This didn\u2019t work very often, because it required both parties to answer the phone at almost exactly the same time. But when it did work, boy howdy! (Not to be confused with \u201cJoe Howdy.\u201d)<\/p>\n

You would think that puberty would have taken care of the crank call fetish, but it only expanded our ambitions \u2013 and My Esteemed Colleague was always several steps ahead of me. \"\"<\/a>He once called right-wing loon Wally George\u2019s talk show to expound upon the \u201cwheat substitute\u201d called \u201chosla\u201d being developed by UCLA scientists. George hung up on him quickly, but only after berating him mightily and triggering a loud explosion sound over the radio.<\/p>\n

He later called a radio program called Loveline to complain about his girlfriend, who was too \u201cstiff\u201d and \u201cunyielding.\u201d He kept the pseudo-psychologists on the phone for a solid two or three minutes before confessing that his girlfriend was, in fact, a cardboard box. He then yelled the word \u201cScrotum!!!\u201d into the phone, but the tape delay dumped it before it got on the air.<\/p>\n

When I went to USC and he went to Dartmouth, we had limited resources to speak to each other, because long distance calls were expensive, and the Internet was only a crazy dream. So, as a cheap means of communication and\/or entertainment, he would call me collect every so often, but never with his own name. Back then, collect calls weren\u2019t automated, so I would receive a call from an operator saying something like \u201cCollect call from \u201cRat In A Box Nuggets,\u201d will you accept?\u201d As we had arranged in advance, I would always decline, but I\u2019d do so with a chuckle. My favorite was the collect call I received from \u201cFrog Hopkins Joe Joe Joe Joe.\u201d Ahhh, good times. Those are joys my own children will never know.<\/p>\n

I shouldn\u2019t complain. The Internet allows a new outlet for anonymous stupidity, and it\u2019s one I have used to great effect. Still, even the Internet has gotten more sophisticated. Once upon a time, my sister used to go into lesbian chat rooms on AOL and write stuff like \u201cI think women should stay home and take orders from men,\u201d and then sit back and watch the flames commence. Now such boorishness gets ignored or filtered out. Yet, incredibly, there are still ways to annoy, to bother, and to waste time. As one door closes, another door opens.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just tragic that, on the telephone, Prince Albert has finally been let out of his can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inthese times of strife and tumult, I lament the fact that my own children are growing up in a world where caller ID has effectively destroyed the art of the prank phone call.We called them \u201ccrank calls,\u201d although \u201cprank\u201d is a more accurate but less alliterative description. I began with the old standards: \u201cIs your ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4975,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions\/4975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}