I was just reading a small story on The Cult of Mac website about Woz the guy who helped create Apple (and the guy on the front of the t-shirt that hasn’t arrived yet). I had to laugh when I read this excerpt about him:
“Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits… after more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph. The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently. Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, “Hey, what are you doing with that?” The receiver was snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: “Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.” The children of America were making their first prank call. And the person who answered the phone was Woz.”
My friend was blessed with the Optus number 0402 69 69 69. He probably still has it – I don’t know. Haven’t been in touch with him for a while. As you can imagine, he ALWAYS got prank phone calls from people thinking dirty thoughts. He managed to do a great copy of Guido Hatsis, and it was pretty funny listening to him tell people that he was a weather forecaster and can it raining blows to the other guys head…geddit? geddit?