Back in my day ...

When I was growing up, a few of my friends and I used to have some fun with the phone. On PA days and during the summer holidays, we would phone kids from our class and pretended that we were officials from some kind of adolescent group and were gathering information via a phone survey. We wrote up a script so that our opening patter was flawless, and without pausing, we would move straight from it into a list of questions. We began innocuously enough, enquiring about their age and grade level, whether or not they smoked or drank or did drugs. From there we would quickly move the interrogations towards sex. Since we were only in the fifth or sixth grade, our questions revolved around the basics like "Have you ever been kissed? Have you ever French kissed? Have you ever been felt up? Do you masturbate?"

It was amazing how many of our classmates actually fell for this and were forthcoming with so much personal information. It was hard for us not to burst out laughing during key moments. Surprisingly, no one guessed our identity.

As we got older, our fun with the phone evolved. Through one of our older siblings, we caught wind of something called "looped lines". These were dedicated phone lines used, I believe, by Bell telephone employees to communicate between themselves. My usually photographic memory is a bit foggy on this front, but these numbers either all had the same first three numbers, or the same last four numbers. If you happened to dial in while someone else was also dialing that particular number, you got connected or your lines became looped. Otherwise, you simply encountered dead air.

My friends and I used to congregate at one or the others' houses after school and after quickly doing our homework (we were good students, after all!) would spend hours cruising the looped lines. I'm not sure exactly what our intentions were. Mainly, the lines were jammed with older teenage guys looking for phone sex. As fascinated as we were, we were only twelve or thirteen at the time, and therefore lacked the experience or the desire to have these kinds of conversations. Nevertheless we continued to make these calls on a regular basis and pretend that we were much older girls.

One day while at one of my closest friend's house, her younger sister gave us a slip of paper with a name, a phone number and a brief description of a person (twenty-eight, very horny and dirty-minded) whom she'd accidentally called once and who stupidly (or desperately) gave her his correct home number during the process. Curious as hell, we dialed the number and crowded around the receiver, giggling as it rang.

Quite obviously, the voice on the other end belonged to a man in his late twenties or early thirties. For whatever reason, he very willingly entered into a conversation with us and was quite graphic in his descriptions of what he liked to do. The most bizarre thing was that he never once asked us who we were and how we had gotten his number.

I'd like to say that our fun ended there, but unfortunately, we were strangely drawn to this aberration of a man. We called him on a regular basis, with different friends present, and essentially egged him on to tell us about himself and his sexual conquests. Each time, he never once asked us who we were, must simply eased himself into conversation without question.

Finally, one day many phone calls later, a friend and I decided it was time to find out what this pervert looked like. We made arrangements for him to come and pick us up at a street corner, and then watched from far away as he sat in his car and stopped every girl that might match the description we'd given him.

I grew up firmly believing that one should never judge a book by its cover, but really, this guy was completely ugly and slimy looking. He was quite obviously desperate for something because he apparently hung around waiting for us for close to an hour (we hopped on a bus and went shopping after the first five minutes, but found this out during a subsequent phone call).

I haven't thought about this stuff in years. I'd almost completely forgotten about looped lines until just the other day. Ironically I had been patting myself on the back the other day about how vigilant and careful I am about my kids' use of the computer and internet at home, when really they could have been in the other room using the phone for all I knew.

The only thing I have over them is that at least I was focussed -- I didn't multi-task!