PhobosAnomaly

Man I remember the fax bomb. Either huge numbers of black pages to burn through the recipients' ink toner, or two bits of A4 taped together neatly to form an infinite loop

The latter was stopped when sending machines had a buffer that images were stored in before they were sent, and most buffers threw an effort when they were full and never sent. Shame.

Cheers. It also made me think of a bit of newspaper advert abuse that an old colleague of mine told me.

Another pair of people, another spat over something minor, but one wasn't to be outdone. In the first week of January, he put an advert into a local popular newspaper, saying something similar to:

Leave your old Christmas trees with me for a charity project! Bring your Christmas trees to 45 Smith Drive, Newport*, if I'm not in then leave them on my lawn!

The net results was days worth of Christmas trees being drive-by yeeted into his garden. Said it was the best 50p per word they'd ever spent.

*edit: I'm sorry if you live at 45 Smith Drive in Newport, and I hope the Christmas tree gods are unkind to you!

Story time!

I forget the origin of the beef, but I remember a guy who grew up with another dude who was just a complete tool to my friend. It wasn't outright bullying, but general arseholery and making his life difficult when it really didn't need to be.

Anyway, my friend has a long memory and a longer grudge streak. I was finishing college at a time when print media was still king but social media was exploding in popularity.

My friend has decided "fuck this, I'm going to ruin this dude's life for a bit". He put an advert in the local paper or freeads (for non UK spuds: the freeads or classifieds is a newspaper-style private advertisements in one place - like a print version of a snapshot of Facebook Marketplace or Vinted for a local area).

Free TV. Call 07000100100 for details.

Anyone to this day knows that anything advertised for free attracts the most annoying, persistent, and unhinged type of people on earth. The freeads was published the following week. I didn't socialise with the guy on the business end of my friend's wrath on account of him being a massive cockwomble, but I understand his phone started to go wild with texts and phone calls asking about a free television - bear in mind that cheap consumer TVs weren't really a thing and a TV purchase was a "buy it for life" thing at the time, so a free TV was just an amazing deal.

It would appear the demand for a free television was too much for the guy. In true mid 2000's fashion, a social media message went up from the clearly annoyed guy, to the tune of:

Hi all, I've started to get loads of prank calls, so I've changed my number. It's 07000200200 now.

With the internet and social interactions online still in the wild west era, this was fairly common. My friend chuckled to himself. The plan worked. Not satisfied with that though, he put another advert in the following week's freeads:

Free TV. Call 07000200200 for details.

The publication date rolls around a few days later, and tens of thousands of this newspaper gets delivered to stores across the region. Obviously, mere hours after the thin yellow paper booklets are released to the public, the idiot's phone starts going banzai. Dozens of calls a day from all corners of society, relentlessly asking about collection and delivery of a television at no charge.

The guy was livid.

Livid, but not smart. He had gotten pissed off with the calls, and was unable to stop the barrage of bargain hunters hitting his digits to get a gogglebox gratis. He went back to his phone network operator and makes the appropriate changes. Not one for releasing his number in a private, carefully controlled manner - the gist of the following was posted to social media a few weeks later:

Not sure why I'm getting so many prank calls, and my mobile network are useless. My new number is 07000300300. Let me know if someone asks you for it because I'm getting annoyed.

Most normal folk wouldn't have risked being burned a third time and released their number in person or by SMS message. That said, I suspect the Venn diagram of twats like this guy who had spent an elder childhood making people's lives difficult; and those who don't appreciate the drawbacks of one-to-many communication, aren't far off a circle.

My friend sees this status update or whatever it was called back then, cuts out the reply slip of the freeads, enclosed his payment, and sends in the following for publication the following week:

Free TV. Call 07000300300 for details. Shout "camel" when I answer so I know you're genuine.

Hilarity likely ensued. My friend found immense satisfaction that the guy who tried to socially ostracise him and physically manhandle him for "fun" was now getting Guantanamo Bay levels of psychological torture, and 90% of calls that he answered started with someone hollering the name of a type of Saharan quardraped species.

The guy never posted anything after that. Not his new number, not any angry rants, nothing at all.

I respected my pal for that stunt. So much mental torture for so little effort. I lost touch with the friend but I still think of him now and then, and I hope that he still chuckles to himself with that prank under his belt, because I certainly do.

It's incredible really. I should ask him for lottery numbers or stock tips.

Depends how want to feel really! It's rhyming slang for "dead". Apologies if it wasn't clear.

It's the antithesis of "vote blue no matter who".

"Vote red, if your kids are brown bread".

I actually feel dirty just writing that.

I had a team leader ten years ago or more when I worked in a incident management room, where he would be the duty manager for the south of the UK.

You could tell something was going to happen or a griefy job was coming in, because he'd nip out for a fag for fifteen minutes just seconds before the first phone call would come in.

It was almost impressive, and once most of the policy or callout decisions had been made, he'd come back in with a cup of tea oblivious to the whole thing.

Absolute legend of a bloke really, I was just jealous that I didn't have that sixth sense.

Looks like you tried to do bullet points?

Yes!! That said, that Genie SIM started my love affair with not giving a fuck and writing multipage messages, which at the time was a bit of a "fuck you" to folk whose phones didn't like them one bit and presented them as individual messages in their inbox.

Didn't need the double ticks in those days, bitch we had read receipts and awwww yeah you had a message to prove you were left on read 😂

When entry level mobile phones became mainstream in the UK (probably around 2000, around the time of the Nokia 3210/3310), SMS were charged at 10p/12p a pop.

Around a year or two later, a mobile network (O2 for the fellow Brits when they changed from Cellnet) kicked off their online offerings with a Genie SIM, which allowed for a whopping 300 free text messages if you applied £15 credit in a month, which remained for calls while you still had an allowance. Data was delivered over dialup at the time. GPRS was far too fancy for data.

My social life went to another gear after that. At least until mid month when my free messages and minutes evaporated.

Nice one dude. I watched the qual live, but honestly most times I watch the praccy, qual, and race highlights on the Formula 1 YouTube channel now. They're pretty good at getting the highlights up within an hour, so it's not a mega drama to dodge spoilers.

They generally put highlights of the F2 and F3 up as well which is always a good waste of twenty minutes each day.

Hopefully the rest of your week stays unremarkable!

yeah alright cheers mate, how was yours?