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Sat 4 Mar, 2006 09:48 am
I thought caller ID had put an end to crank calls.
Last night about 3:30 my phone rang. When the phone rings that time of night I expect something important enough that it can't wait until morning so I got up to answer it. I missed the call but my voice mail picked it up.
It was a kind of robotic voice that said:
"Mr. B (yes, it used our real last name). Answer this one question. (I can't understand the part that comes here) Neither can I."
A few minutes later the phone rings again. This time Mr. B gets it. A different robotic voice starts in. I can only hear Mr. B's side of the call and a bit of sound coming from the other end.
There is a little gap after Mr. B speaks, then a recorded sounding voice responds, this goes on for maybe a minute.
Mr. B hangs up, does the old *69 ring back trick, they pick up.
Now a new recorded voice responds to Mr. B who tells them not to call here anymore.
I managed to find out that the phone call came from the area code for Seattle but can't find who the number belongs to.
Has anyone else had a robotic type crank call that speaks and responds in a semi-coherent way?
How do they do it?
It kind of freaked me out.
Almost sounds like an alternate reality game.
Is that a real thing or a pretend thing?
Mr. B speculates that they had recorded snippets that they could access quickly via computer.
When Mr. B said "Who is this?" (when he *69ed the call)
The voice said "This is Howard Stern."
The the voice continued on in Howard Sterns voice.
You could hear people laughing in the background so maybe they had their phone up to a computer speaker or were making an internet call or something.
Hmmm.
Were there hallucinogenics involved ?
No. Not at all.
I'm actually quite serious about figuring out how this was done because I would really like to know who did it.
That's really weird. It sounds like a cross between a college prank, and some new marketing wave.
This might help you boomer
Robot
I suppose they could have found our name and number through the phone book because the DID know our first and last name.
But why us?
Perhaps it was random -- that's why I'm trying to find out if anyone else has had such a thing happen.
Aha, CJane! That could be it.
It doesn't sound like that particular one can be programmed to carry on a conversation type thing though. Or use famous voices.
But I'll bet it is something like that.
The Competition could be trying to alienate customers.
Think how effective such wee-hour, recorded messages could be in an election.
Where's the place
Now, when I can finally manage it, I'll show you the real place in all its glory.
Hey, I saw a place online that had prank phone calls that they had done by recording a bunch of snippets of dialogue from various actors. Each phone call was done with one actor's voice, and the person doing it would use the same five or six snippets of dialog to respond to the person they had called. One was my own beloved governator; they used lines like, "I'm John Kimball." "I'm a cop, dammit!" "Stop whining!" etc.
Lemme see if I can find the link...
Here we go, not the one I was thinking of, but this site has one using Howard Stern's voice:
http://humor.about.com/b/a/178864.htm
That has got to be it, cyphercat!
Now I just need to figure out why someone in Seattle would decide to try it on me.
My husband shares a name with a locally famous guitar player. We get calls all the time asking if he is the "X who plays guitar". Maybe it was meant for him.
An alternate reality game is a real game about a fake mystery. The puzzle mixes Internet sites with real-world experiences. Kind of like a treasure hunt, you solve on-line puzzles, receive phone messages, faxes, locate puzzles placed in real-world locations, etc.
Generally, it is a collaborative effort to solve the puzzle; someone in Seattle may retrieve a CD left at a coffee house while someone in New York might pick up a note left in a library book.
Doesn't sound like your thing, though.
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