Tuesday Musings #8

Who was the last person you prank called? What did you say?

I'm not sure if this was the last prank call I made, but I made a series of calls in high school to my major high school crush. (This is embarrassingly idiotic.) He was kind of a weird kid from an interesting family. He claimed the reason they didn't mow their lawn was because they were all too romantic to like short grass. He told me once that I wasn't Machiavellian enough. He was weird. I was (am?!?) weird. I had an on-again, off-again crush on him for at least two and a half years.

I am the oldest of seven kids and there was a very distinctive background noise at our house, so I had to be extra devious when I made prank calls (see I made enough of them to figure this out). Do any of you remember the old rotary dial desk phones?


Well, you could unscrew the plastic covering over the mouthpiece and take out a metal thingamajig. Then, you could screw the plastic part back on and the phone would look normal to curious passing siblings, but the person on the other end couldn't hear a thing. So, to answer the second part of the question, I didn't say a thing. I used to call this kid's house and just listen. The fascinating (at least to me at the time) thing was, they would talk. To "no one". Yep, more than once (I said it was a series), for up to twenty minutes at a time, someone, either my weird crush or his older brother would just talk about who knows what. I can't remember what either of them said, probably because my sensible side (there, now you know I have one) has tried to forget how absolutely ridiculous I have been in my checkered past.