Phone

  As I have said before, I have been known to do phone pranks.  There is something about not being seen that appeals to me.  And, the one you call can't reach through the phone and hit you.  That is a plus.

 At Anderson College, each suite in our dorm had a phone in the hallway.  If you wanted to use it to call out of the school, you had to go through the switchboard and get an outside line.  Any long-distance call had to be collect, because the school wasn't going to pay for it.  Our parents got a lot of collect calls.  Then one Sunday night, things changed.

 One of my suitemates picked up the phone, but the school's switchboard didn't answer.  He dialed a number, and it went through without help.  Then, another one of my suitemates did the same thing.  He could call his parents without it being collect.  We had a phone that could bypass the switchboard.  And as it turned out, our phone was the only one that could do it.  We went around our dorm and told other students.  We had a free phone.  The line formed down our hallway.  

 After the novelty wore off, we started to make prank calls by ordering pizzas to non-existing addresses.  We spent almost the entire night on the phone.  The next day, we found it didn't work anymore.  The school found out and repaired our phone line.  No more free calls.  The nice thing was they didn't make us pay for the calls, since they couldn't be sure who was calling whom.  Good thing.  We might still be paying that bill 50 years later.