Voice Fe-Mail Problems

by Steve Kremer
Copyright ©1995-1998 JokeWallpaper.com

This was a simple prank that was pulled off by a friend of mine back in his college days.

On my friend's dormitory floor was a guy who had decided that he was God's great gift to women. Everyone joked that his dorm room should have a revolving door with all the young ladies that went through it. Mr. Don Juan decided that actually attending classes were causing him to miss important return phone calls from some of his girlfriends. He decided he had to get a phone answering machine. Now, this occurred a few years back when answering machines were a new thing. They also were rather expensive and complicated. Mr. Juan spent more than a few dollars and went ahead and bought a new answering machine. He bragged about how he would never miss a call from any of his lady friends

My friend and his roommate decided to fix Mr. Juan's wagon, or more specifically his new phone machine. They were both the technical types so along with the assorted computer gadgets they also had a nice tape recording system that they had patched into their telephone. Their prank was really rather simple. They waited until they knew their target was gone, called his number and recorded the outgoing message on his machine. They rewound their tape then called his number back and when the "beep" sounded to leave a message they played back his out-going message. They repeated this several times. So when Mr. Juan returned home and checked his messages most of them were copies of his outgoing message.

Since my friend and his roommate were known as the dorm floor's "technical experts" it was no surprise that Mr. Juan came knocking on their door for help figuring out this "damn machine." They gladly went down to his dorm room to check out the "malfunctioning" phone machine. After a quick look at the instruction manual, flipping a few switches, and memorizing the three digit remote access code, they pronounced the machine cured.

They let Mr. Juan use his new phone machine in peace for a few weeks before putting phase two of their plan into action.

Their brief visit perusal of the instruction book for the phone machine gave them an idea of a way to scare off Mr. Juan's lady friends.

One of the options of the phone machine was the ability to check for messages from any phone and to change the out-going message on the machine. As long as you had that three digit code. My friend wrote a script and invited his girlfriend over to do a little acting. The script read (woman's voice slightly sobbing):

"This is Susan Juan, I'm Don's wife. If this is one of Don's little girlfriends I wish you'd just stop calling. Don't you know you're ruining our marriage? And what about our little baby...just leave us alone!"

They recorded the message on to their tape machine and then "uploaded" it to Don Juan's phone machine making it his outgoing message.

By that point the whole prank was pretty well known to most on the dorm floor. People would ask old Don "How's your wife?" or "How's that little baby of yours?" Of course he would respond with a puzzled look. The prank finally ended when he received an unusual message from his mother asking "Just when did you get married, and how long have I been a grandmother?"

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