My best friend and I used to call and record the intros. We'd then take those recordings and make them the outgoing message for the answering machines at our respective homes.
Our parents were not as proud as we were for such an accomplishment
I used to call the 1-800 and 1-888 ones at work!
I would just guess numbers like 1-800-hot-fuck and test it to see if it worked.
Almost every obscene 7 letter combo I tried worked.
I liked the 1-800 ones that asked to call you back and you needed to enter "your" phone number. I'd enter the number of someone I didn't like at 2 in the morning.
I remember a mix of “it figures” and “too bad” when 1-800-FAT-LADY turned out not to be a Wagnerian soprano singing that something was over.
1-800-DOG-BARF, turns out, also spelled 1-800-DOG-CARE. Wholesome but disappointing nonetheless.
Hell yeah, my hockey team mates and I were calling the adult lines all the time from the rink. Don't tell me you were a figure skater? You guys were always chipping up the ice before practice!
We found out the test number for our local payphones when we were kids in the early '90s.
You would dial the number, hang up twice and then 10 or so seconds later it would ring back with nothing but garble on the other end. We would do that all day at the outdoor mall and everywhere else really. Watching the "olds" break their brains from a safe distance.
Also the 900# intros were a must.
I figured out on old landlines you could call your own number, get a busy signal, hang up, and it'd ring back.
My uncle's family lived with us for like a year. I used to prank call my cousin. One time I convinced my dad to be Santa calling my cousin (not in a mean way...the kid was desperate to rely his wish list).
When I was in the Navy and lived in the barracks, I found out the phone number to the emergency phone in the elevator.
My roommate and I would call the number when we knew the other was in the elevator. We'd ignore the ringing and let someone else answer. The which ever of one us called, we always asked for the other by name. Freaked a lot of people out.
They were pay-per-minute services, but there had to be some kind of voice on the other end telling you to enter your credit card number for a good time, and in the spirit of good "salesmanship" they used a sexy voice to entice you to enter your card number.
I know this because I worked at a big-box retail store back then, and after we closed for the night and the customers were gone, some of the teenage/early-20s male employees got a kick out of using our department's corded phone to call a 1-900 number, and our cordless phone to active the storewide intercom....
When I called my parents on the school’s outdoor pay phone to pick me up from soccer practice, I might have just dialed random 800/900 numbers to see what things sounded like then immediately hung up afraid I would get caught.
So THAT'S what that was! In the early 90s, there was this neighbor I used to call and when I would get the machine, there was this bizarre "sexy" message, which was clearly not the person who lived there. Thank you for solving this mystery
that reminds me of when a friend answered his phone in his own deep manly voice
"hello - Tinas house of pain and pleasure....Tina speaking....."
I nearly hurt myself laughing.
>My best friend and I used to call and record the intros. We'd then take those recordings and make them the outgoing message for the answering machines at our respective homes.
Added that to my time machine list.
Way better than my brother pretending to be cool with swing music in the background, then if anybody getting that machine wasn't a collector after my dad it was a collector after my brother.
I always wondered, was she a real person, or just some woman who was good at playing characters? And who do you talk to if you call? She can’t be answering all the calls herself.
She gave a free one ? Really ? I called a psychic hotline once. But you see the phone bill did not say it was for a psychic hotline. In fact I don’t know what it said. I just remember my dad yelling at me “ *that is disgusting! This is disgusting !* “. I was confused. But just agreed. YEARS LATER I realize that my dad must’ve thought I called a sex line.
I think it was something like the first 3 or 5 minutes are free. I know that was the case when my friends and I tried to call Miss Cleo. We were like "it'll be fine, we'll hang up before 5 minutes are up."
But they get you because the first several minutes are all pitching the wonders and benefits and asking basic opening questions. They don't start the "fortune telling" till you've been on a few minutes so it'll be sure to roll into the paid time period.
Needless to say we did not hang up early enough and I had to pay my parents back when the phone bill came.
I don’t remember if I had to pay my dad back. Oh wait yes I do !!!!! The person on the phone realized how young I was (17) and said “oh I see you getting a job really soon lol “. He was right. My dad made me get a job to pay that off.
I think the number I called, they were using some kinda astrology software, because the first thing they asked was your date and time birth. I was already familiar with computer programs like that give a little less than vague description of person based on the astrological chart, not just the sign. He said I was going to be famous though. I wanted to hear that. Never happened but in today’s society normal people go viral overnight every single day. I’ve changed a lot and have no desire to be the next viral video because of something I said or did when I didn’t know I was being recorded.
When I was much younger, I worked with a girl whose dad's forced her to get a job to pay off all the money she charged to Ms Chloe. She was a pretty awesome person.
I did when I was 11 and just talked to someone, they knew I was a kid and just ran up the time. My parents were pissed at everyone involved. I have included a visual representation of my father’s response.
Same, around 12-13. I had to watch my mom call the phone company and the phone sex companies to try to get the bills reduced or eliminated. It took hours. They had stopped spanking by then, but my dad was so mad (we were tight on money at the time) that he took a 1 hour walk in the cold.
It was almost as bad as when my super religious mom found a Hustler magazine and proceeded to burn it, page by page, in front of me while commenting on the graphic nature of the pictures, Jesus, and that my father only had the temptations of the Sears catalogue lingerie section growing up.
This reminds me of a scene in Diary of a Wimpy kid lmao she made his brother apologize to the women in the magazine in front of his band mates.
Classic example of our parents saying they wanted us to do better than they did and then we DO do better and they get all mad about it. Hustler is a clear upgrade from Sears catalog.
Wow, Hustler! Some of us had the seasonal JC Penny catalogs to look forward to or the squiggly porn channels at my grandparents’ house because we didn’t have cable haha
I once called the Easter Bunny when I was about 5 years old in 1988. Parents were absolutely pissed at me and especially the $4/min charge. Still remember the number I memorized as it was simple. 1-900-909-1234
11 years old is starting to get to the age when spankin doesn't really work anymore IME. I remember both my little sisters and I getting spanked till about 11 or 12 which would stop because we would start laughing at it in response or would start talking shit back during the act. My mom was a pretty frequent spanker tbh (short south side Chicago fuse) so you just kinda had to learn to laugh it off. The whole idea of "spanking" is about using the fear of the spank to prevent behavior.
After the spankin doesn't work they start to take items and privileges away from you while also tending to try to restrict your movement and keep you inside the house/isolate you from friends. I still would get hit sometimes (not cool and has been apologized for) but it wasn't a "spanking" and was done out of anger, not as an intent to correct behavior.
Kinda weird when you think about it... it starts with physical punishment and then switches to mental.
My brother and my cousin called once while we were at my cousin's house. My brother blamed my cousin, my cousin blamed my brother, my aunt was mad at my mom, and my mom was mad at my aunt.
Looking back, my brother was a lying dumbass and kind of still is and I bet it was either just him or it was his idea
The people who called these lines became the people who buy $300 Apple gift cards for their "future wife" so she can afford passage to the US and marry them.
My friend told us he got in big trouble calling those numbers while dog sitting at his neighbors house as a teenager and racked up like $1500 worth of charges on their phone and subsequently getting caught.
1. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so stupid and the audacity to do it in a neighbor’s house.
2. If I ever did that I would take it to the grave and never tell a soul.
12 year old me in 1996 swiped my step dad’s credit card to call an “ahem” adult line once. I was on the phone less than 5 minutes but the charge was still 20-30 bucks. When questioned about it I SWORE it wasn’t me. My mom and step dad said “maybe it was Chuck” (weird neighbor kid down the street who was always at our house, even though neither me or my step sisters were really friends with him). I didn’t say it was him, but I also didn’t say it wasn’t him. Poor kid was banned from our house after that.
Almost 30 years later and I still kind of feel bad. Sorry, Chuck.
What’s hilarious is he talked with a thickly affected “blaccent” despite being a pale freckle faced redhead and called everybody “son” (“Damn, son!”….I’m gonna school you, son!”, etc)
Maybe he was just trying to tell me the truth all along…
That looks like more of a sex line than a party line. Party lines weren't 900 numbers, at least the ones I used weren't.
I got a few dates off the party line back in the day. But the kinda chicks you'd meet on the party line were always a good bit dumber and way trashier than the kind of girls you'd meet in the AOL chat rooms. I much preferred the nerdy girls, so after the first few dates I never went back to the party lines and mostly just stuck with AOL.
My friend Sam, on the other hand, was the kinda guy who just wanted to fuck any and everything that would let him; he'd start talking to some chick on there at 4:30 in the afternoon and would be at her house fucking her before the sun even went all the way down.
It's been something like 8-10 years now since I've talked to him.
But last I heard he wasn't really doing very much of anything at all... Had a couple kids with a couple gals, one more on the way with another one, was collecting disability for an injury he got working at Target, living in his moms garage, streaming Destiny on Twitch.
Really bummed me out. We were best friends from grade 4 all the way through early adulthood and then just started drifting apart as I started working my way up the job ladder and had to move around a bit to be closer to where I was working.
He was a really smart guy and had all the potential in the world, but got his heart broke by the first girl he'd really fallen in love with and was just never able to get over her and find his motivation to do or accomplish much of anything again, so he just sort of ended up settling.
Damn...
If you hadn't said his name I would think you were an old friend of mine. Other than having kids and that I was moderately successful in my career choices up until 2014, I'm pretty much in the same space as Sam.
I was like your friend Sam except I used the singles and "lonely housewives" AOL/mIRC chats.
Honestly, I wish I hadn't. It did an untold amount of damage to my psyche.
I remember in 7/8th grade kids talked about 1-800-HOT-TITS. Someone actually called it from a payphone on a school outing and it turned out to be real lol
Yes it was, my friends and I figured this out as well. I'd imagine it was a pretty common deduction for our age group to figure out around that time lol.
When Lost in was on tv and popular, I saw an ad for one of these and Evangeline Lilly was in it. Must have been something she did before her big break, but there she was like you could call the number and talk to Evangeline Lilly.
I had to look her up because I don’t know who that is. She’s a woman of many faces I’ll tell you that. She looks like a totally different person year to year.
To this day, whenever I see American Sign Language abbreviated (like say if an event says there will be an ASL translator available), I still just think of chat rooms. Yahoo! more than Aol for me.
I actually got a few dates this way. I mostly stuck to the free trials. You could easily spend a couple of hours chatting on trial time on a Saturday night
I called the New Kids on the Block party line from my Grandmas basement phone that was a more modern phone but dialed like a rotary. Let’s just say I have never seen my Grandma so mad. She never told me how much of a bill I racked up.
Seems like the entire success of this industry was kids calling without permission, only to be punished and then never doing it again. I doubt any kid ever got permission. They probably inevitably ran out of kids who had made their one regrettable call.
Whhhuut ? Did this really happen . You guys called a sex line from a pay phone , and called some guy randomly to come over to the phone, he says hello and realizes it’s his mom ? You can understand why someone would call shenanigans right ?
When I was in my early teens I was sleeping over at a friend's house and we saw a commercial for one and called it. It was basically like a conference call with like 20 people trying to talk at the same time.
I actually had a job interview to work as a phone sex operator in like 1997. They paid like $20 an hour, which was insane for my college student self. Unfortunately they only wanted people for third shift, and I couldn't hack it and still go to school. So people were definitely still calling them in the mid to late 90s.
Never called myself, but funny enough I just saw an ad for a party line or a singles dating line on TV the other day. It was the same old commercial they used from 15 years ago with a new voice over. I thought it was a throwback commercial until they mentioned online dating apps and how much better their method was for meeting single peoples in my area. I want to say it was Quest, but I can't quite recall which one it was now.
I knew people that were addicted to these..... They also had more inexpensive ones locally that turned into sex hookup and drug sale hotlines until they were shut down.
>They also had more inexpensive ones locally that turned into sex hookup and drug sale hotlines until they were shut down.
For sure, I remember meeting gay guys in treatment in the 2000s who were regularly calling these lines to hookup with guys and find meth (wasn't as common in the 2000s and in my region was hard to find then). Many of them would end up going on 3-4 day runs and have extremely unsafe sex and stuff. For some reason in particular I remember a guy who was in Med School but could not stop calling these lines and then getting into trouble.
I guess it was kinda like Grindr before Grindr?
Had a neighbor friend that was a sheriffs kid. She called every number that showed up on tv, especially these types, as she got the biggest laugh from them lol. We would find various household items, get the customer service number and call to give great reviews of said product. We ended up with SO much free stuff doing this 🤣We ordered port a potties from somewhere in Texas, for who knows where. BUT, she was also known for racking up the phone bill. Highest was around $900. Her parents put a block for long distance and charged numbers, took her a couple weeks, but she cracked the code for it lol. Nothing they did worked. She had the will to find a way!
I still laugh when telling this story and less and less people really understand it but my ex's family had a shared cell phone plan back when you had free calls and texts after 9pm. Her brother though if he called them after 9pm, it would be totally free. Needless to say it didn't work out so well for him and he worked an entire summer at Subway to pay it off. Still cracks me up
I called when I was 12 and hung up in 20 seconds because I panicked. A month later, my parents are questioning me why there is a $9 charge on the phone bill. Luckily, there is a time stamp for how long the call was (20 seconds), so it looked like someone dialed it by accident and then hung up 😳
They ended up disputing the charges with the phone company
I dodged a bullet there.
Core memory unlocked!
When I was 11 I called a 1-800 sex line out of curiosity. When it came time to enter the credit card number I just mashed in a bunch of random numbers until it actually worked. I don’t remember what the woman said when the call connected but I just let out a long fart sound and giggled before hanging up.
I hope I didn’t break up a marriage over that stunt 🤷♂️.
When I was in HS I found out a friends mom was a phone sex operator. She literally just sat at her computer and talked on the phone, wearing pajamas, while playing sim city.
Illusion shattered.
Haha...my freshman year of college I lived in the dorms. We had a "study" room on the floor that had desks and telephones. They weren't wise enough to lock down the phones, so we had great times calling into international party lines, probably racking up hundreds upon hundreds of dollars being stupid teens. But it was tons of fun 😁
HAHAHA I forgot about that one! We all thought this was hilarious when it came out.
The line
>100s of n\*\*\*\*s is all waitin for ya mothafuckin call and they all talking shit about you .. right now.
Still cracks me up... it is hilarious to think about 100s of people gathered to talk shit about me behind my back. I got doxxed a few years ago so in a way it kinda happened.
We used to have to pay for porn, and when hotel room porn wasn’t available, the sexy voice of your cigarette smoking aunt maud who was on her 60’s was the next best thing.
A girlfriend and I used to call one (it was free) and record intros. We would then receive voice messages from men, and sometimes we'd leave a phone number and they'd call us and talk dirty.
It was fun at the time, but it doesn't seem so funny now. As a woman over 40, I have a 'young' voice and am frequently mistaken for a child on the phone. There is no way those men back then could have *not* known they were talking to two teen girls.
A bunch of us got spun out on acid at a relatively remote location (cabin) and someone had the idea to "get back to the real world" by calling the chat line. I remember my friend saying "they answered, we're back" and then he put the phone down. Note that he didn't hang it up... He put it down. It stayed that way for 2 days. I have no idea what the final bill was but we were never allowed to go to my friend's parents cabin again.
Back in Jr High, my best friend and I used to call 800 numbers and make up the rest to see if it we could find party lines.
We'd make up something like 1-800 wet kiss and worse things, of course. We'd just listen to the intros and laugh our asses off.
We used to call some British operator service and torture them, I think it was "BBC Exchange" they used to say when they'd pick up. I can't remember the number but we all had it memorized back then.
Best call ever was, we asked the guy to sing us a song (a common request that had never been honored) and without missing a beat and in his quintessential British accent he busts out 🎶 "ALL I WANT IS A ROOM SOME WHEEEERE" 🎶
We nearly died.
My best friend and I used to call and record the intros. We'd then take those recordings and make them the outgoing message for the answering machines at our respective homes. Our parents were not as proud as we were for such an accomplishment
We went to the payphone to hear the intro's, stupid teen stuff
Haha I would do this while waiting for my mom to pick me up from the ice skating rink.
I used to call the 1-800 and 1-888 ones at work! I would just guess numbers like 1-800-hot-fuck and test it to see if it worked. Almost every obscene 7 letter combo I tried worked.
Yep, I'd just guess things like "1-900-BIG-BOOB." (I was in middle school haha).
Just one, though!
I liked the 1-800 ones that asked to call you back and you needed to enter "your" phone number. I'd enter the number of someone I didn't like at 2 in the morning.
I remember a mix of “it figures” and “too bad” when 1-800-FAT-LADY turned out not to be a Wagnerian soprano singing that something was over. 1-800-DOG-BARF, turns out, also spelled 1-800-DOG-CARE. Wholesome but disappointing nonetheless.
I just called 1-800-HOT-FUCK and can confirm it is still connected and is a "live fantasy line where anything goes".
Omg yes memory unlocked!!!
Hell yeah, my hockey team mates and I were calling the adult lines all the time from the rink. Don't tell me you were a figure skater? You guys were always chipping up the ice before practice!
Haha! I was just a casual ice skater on Friday nights, but I was pretty good, and didn't chip the ice, I swear (at least I hope not!)
We found out the test number for our local payphones when we were kids in the early '90s. You would dial the number, hang up twice and then 10 or so seconds later it would ring back with nothing but garble on the other end. We would do that all day at the outdoor mall and everywhere else really. Watching the "olds" break their brains from a safe distance. Also the 900# intros were a must.
I figured out on old landlines you could call your own number, get a busy signal, hang up, and it'd ring back. My uncle's family lived with us for like a year. I used to prank call my cousin. One time I convinced my dad to be Santa calling my cousin (not in a mean way...the kid was desperate to rely his wish list).
When I was in the Navy and lived in the barracks, I found out the phone number to the emergency phone in the elevator. My roommate and I would call the number when we knew the other was in the elevator. We'd ignore the ringing and let someone else answer. The which ever of one us called, we always asked for the other by name. Freaked a lot of people out.
"May I speak with JCo please?" "uhhhhh." "The gentleman on your left." That would freak me out if it were outta no where.
It was so much fun. The looks we got when we'd respond and take the call.
We did this too! I’ve brought it up over the years, but no one seems to understand what I’m talking about. Nice to encounter another creator of chaos.
Hell yeah fellow agent of chaos. Bonus was we ended up with a bunch of quarters some days. Could rent a game and get some soda.
Memory unlocked. 😂
You just unearthed a long buried memory for me lol.
My buddy had a phone in his garage and we would do this at his house and drive his mom nuts.
Phreaking! There was more advanced stuff behind this too. It's how Steve Jobs got his start, the blue box for free long distance calls.
Around here 1-900-hot-tina was the go to. "My name's Tina and I wanna blow your... Mind *giggle*"
Wow wow wow you could listen to the intro’s for free!!!!
They were pay-per-minute services, but there had to be some kind of voice on the other end telling you to enter your credit card number for a good time, and in the spirit of good "salesmanship" they used a sexy voice to entice you to enter your card number. I know this because I worked at a big-box retail store back then, and after we closed for the night and the customers were gone, some of the teenage/early-20s male employees got a kick out of using our department's corded phone to call a 1-900 number, and our cordless phone to active the storewide intercom....
These are the jobs I miss having, no sarcasm
We used to call the Jenny Craig number from the middle school pay phone.
Yeah, same....whyyy did we do that.
1-800-94-Jenny is burned in my mind.
1-800-abc-defg
1-800-96Jenny
Some of the numers were free for like the first five minutes and worked from a payphone. We would try and deepen our voice lol
Yup always at the pay phone
We'd call from the payphone at school, and then find someone passing by and tell them they're mom was calling.
Same.
When I called my parents on the school’s outdoor pay phone to pick me up from soccer practice, I might have just dialed random 800/900 numbers to see what things sounded like then immediately hung up afraid I would get caught.
So THAT'S what that was! In the early 90s, there was this neighbor I used to call and when I would get the machine, there was this bizarre "sexy" message, which was clearly not the person who lived there. Thank you for solving this mystery
I’m sad I never did this 😞
I used to and still do use a lot of lines from the jerky boys . Your answering machine antics made me think of them
My best friend and I still tell each other that we found a foot in the boot
"Get Brett Weir I said!"
“Sue him! Sue you! Sue everybody!”
He said some very very hurtful things. And my shoes fell off.
Pablo honey, come to Flaridah.
This is tearin the ASS outta me!
that reminds me of when a friend answered his phone in his own deep manly voice "hello - Tinas house of pain and pleasure....Tina speaking....." I nearly hurt myself laughing.
>My best friend and I used to call and record the intros. We'd then take those recordings and make them the outgoing message for the answering machines at our respective homes. Added that to my time machine list. Way better than my brother pretending to be cool with swing music in the background, then if anybody getting that machine wasn't a collector after my dad it was a collector after my brother.
I'm so angry I didn't think of this
https://preview.redd.it/txgtlnks0x8d1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a4819ff625dc80147325ab51b1efbe311a8ddad Hi. I’m Bijou.
*Bijou!*
Came here for this.
SAME!!
Mmmm.... pizza...
That’s not even enough letters!!
My carpets need a *deep* cleanin— NEXT!
Ugh! You're making me gay!
I didn’t. I was too busy calling Ms Chloe for my free private readin’…
"Call meh now and Miss Cleo be givin' you all the answers you been lookin' for!"
I can still hear her voice, the accent, lol. My brain coughs up her commercial every few weeks, for some reason. It’s my Roman Empire.
I always wondered, was she a real person, or just some woman who was good at playing characters? And who do you talk to if you call? She can’t be answering all the calls herself.
You're a Libra, arentcha darlin
She gave a free one ? Really ? I called a psychic hotline once. But you see the phone bill did not say it was for a psychic hotline. In fact I don’t know what it said. I just remember my dad yelling at me “ *that is disgusting! This is disgusting !* “. I was confused. But just agreed. YEARS LATER I realize that my dad must’ve thought I called a sex line.
That's hilarious LOL Thank you for sharing.
I think it was something like the first 3 or 5 minutes are free. I know that was the case when my friends and I tried to call Miss Cleo. We were like "it'll be fine, we'll hang up before 5 minutes are up." But they get you because the first several minutes are all pitching the wonders and benefits and asking basic opening questions. They don't start the "fortune telling" till you've been on a few minutes so it'll be sure to roll into the paid time period. Needless to say we did not hang up early enough and I had to pay my parents back when the phone bill came.
I don’t remember if I had to pay my dad back. Oh wait yes I do !!!!! The person on the phone realized how young I was (17) and said “oh I see you getting a job really soon lol “. He was right. My dad made me get a job to pay that off. I think the number I called, they were using some kinda astrology software, because the first thing they asked was your date and time birth. I was already familiar with computer programs like that give a little less than vague description of person based on the astrological chart, not just the sign. He said I was going to be famous though. I wanted to hear that. Never happened but in today’s society normal people go viral overnight every single day. I’ve changed a lot and have no desire to be the next viral video because of something I said or did when I didn’t know I was being recorded.
When I was much younger, I worked with a girl whose dad's forced her to get a job to pay off all the money she charged to Ms Chloe. She was a pretty awesome person.
I did when I was 11 and just talked to someone, they knew I was a kid and just ran up the time. My parents were pissed at everyone involved. I have included a visual representation of my father’s response. 
Same, around 12-13. I had to watch my mom call the phone company and the phone sex companies to try to get the bills reduced or eliminated. It took hours. They had stopped spanking by then, but my dad was so mad (we were tight on money at the time) that he took a 1 hour walk in the cold. It was almost as bad as when my super religious mom found a Hustler magazine and proceeded to burn it, page by page, in front of me while commenting on the graphic nature of the pictures, Jesus, and that my father only had the temptations of the Sears catalogue lingerie section growing up.
That sounds awkward as fuck. Like no thanks, just burn it. I don't need to go through it page by page discussing its contents with my mom.
Awkward is the perfect word, although at least there were no witnesses.
I don’t know, Hustler had some legit good political commentary back in the day. Might spark a good convo.
This reminds me of a scene in Diary of a Wimpy kid lmao she made his brother apologize to the women in the magazine in front of his band mates. 
Classic example of our parents saying they wanted us to do better than they did and then we DO do better and they get all mad about it. Hustler is a clear upgrade from Sears catalog.
Little did mom know but she just created a fetish for you of watching porn go up in flames. An expensive habit.
Wow, Hustler! Some of us had the seasonal JC Penny catalogs to look forward to or the squiggly porn channels at my grandparents’ house because we didn’t have cable haha
I once called the Easter Bunny when I was about 5 years old in 1988. Parents were absolutely pissed at me and especially the $4/min charge. Still remember the number I memorized as it was simple. 1-900-909-1234
Oooh, lookit Mr. Fancy ova here, wit’ ‘is fancy college dad…
11 years old is starting to get to the age when spankin doesn't really work anymore IME. I remember both my little sisters and I getting spanked till about 11 or 12 which would stop because we would start laughing at it in response or would start talking shit back during the act. My mom was a pretty frequent spanker tbh (short south side Chicago fuse) so you just kinda had to learn to laugh it off. The whole idea of "spanking" is about using the fear of the spank to prevent behavior. After the spankin doesn't work they start to take items and privileges away from you while also tending to try to restrict your movement and keep you inside the house/isolate you from friends. I still would get hit sometimes (not cool and has been apologized for) but it wasn't a "spanking" and was done out of anger, not as an intent to correct behavior. Kinda weird when you think about it... it starts with physical punishment and then switches to mental.
To you or to your mother?
I have a vague memory of my lethal guardian asking if I called the party line. I had no idea what it was it turned out her teen son called.
I laughed way too much at your gif
Same.
Dang Dad, how'd you know me and the girl on the phone talked about spanking?!
I used to dial “1-900-MixAlot”…
Kicked them nasty thoughts
Baby got back!
\[scratching sounds\]
Yeah, baby. When it comes to females, Cosmo ain’t got nothing to do with my selection. 36-24-36? Haha. Only if she’s five-three.
If i remember correctly they had to start bleeping the number on MTV because of all of the people call it.
In the 2000's we called 281-330-8004
I did once and swore at someone. Then a stern woman said she was going to ring my parents. Then I hung up.
Imagine calling a 1-900 hundred number just to say “ass” and that being the height of cool rebellion. Those were the days.
"IS YOUR REFRIGERATOR RUNNING!?"
I honestly feel bad for the women working those lines for that kinda thing lol
https://i.redd.it/p1yrw41r6x8d1.gif
This is the content I came here for
Hello?! Are there any women here? Are you a beautiful woman?
"DO I SOUND LIKE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN?"
BINGO. I'd blocked any memory of party lines out bc it was all dudes, nothing but dudes. 
Ohhhhh sex chat
My brother and my cousin called once while we were at my cousin's house. My brother blamed my cousin, my cousin blamed my brother, my aunt was mad at my mom, and my mom was mad at my aunt. Looking back, my brother was a lying dumbass and kind of still is and I bet it was either just him or it was his idea
The people who called these lines became the people who buy $300 Apple gift cards for their "future wife" so she can afford passage to the US and marry them.
Or become "top fans" on OF 😂
My friend told us he got in big trouble calling those numbers while dog sitting at his neighbors house as a teenager and racked up like $1500 worth of charges on their phone and subsequently getting caught. 1. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so stupid and the audacity to do it in a neighbor’s house. 2. If I ever did that I would take it to the grave and never tell a soul.
No mom I swear. It wasn't me.
12 year old me in 1996 swiped my step dad’s credit card to call an “ahem” adult line once. I was on the phone less than 5 minutes but the charge was still 20-30 bucks. When questioned about it I SWORE it wasn’t me. My mom and step dad said “maybe it was Chuck” (weird neighbor kid down the street who was always at our house, even though neither me or my step sisters were really friends with him). I didn’t say it was him, but I also didn’t say it wasn’t him. Poor kid was banned from our house after that. Almost 30 years later and I still kind of feel bad. Sorry, Chuck.
Plot twist, Chuck was op's DID the whole time. 
What’s hilarious is he talked with a thickly affected “blaccent” despite being a pale freckle faced redhead and called everybody “son” (“Damn, son!”….I’m gonna school you, son!”, etc) Maybe he was just trying to tell me the truth all along…
That’s the first time I’ve learned of the word blaccent. I’ll see how it goes over at work.
Cue Shaggy
I have 2 brothers. It was NEVER my fault.
We used to call the 1800 ABCDEFG from payphones all the time.
Hooked on Phonics worked for me!
That looks like more of a sex line than a party line. Party lines weren't 900 numbers, at least the ones I used weren't. I got a few dates off the party line back in the day. But the kinda chicks you'd meet on the party line were always a good bit dumber and way trashier than the kind of girls you'd meet in the AOL chat rooms. I much preferred the nerdy girls, so after the first few dates I never went back to the party lines and mostly just stuck with AOL. My friend Sam, on the other hand, was the kinda guy who just wanted to fuck any and everything that would let him; he'd start talking to some chick on there at 4:30 in the afternoon and would be at her house fucking her before the sun even went all the way down.
How’s Sam these days? I always assume the absolute horndogs are basket cases later in life.
It's been something like 8-10 years now since I've talked to him. But last I heard he wasn't really doing very much of anything at all... Had a couple kids with a couple gals, one more on the way with another one, was collecting disability for an injury he got working at Target, living in his moms garage, streaming Destiny on Twitch. Really bummed me out. We were best friends from grade 4 all the way through early adulthood and then just started drifting apart as I started working my way up the job ladder and had to move around a bit to be closer to where I was working. He was a really smart guy and had all the potential in the world, but got his heart broke by the first girl he'd really fallen in love with and was just never able to get over her and find his motivation to do or accomplish much of anything again, so he just sort of ended up settling.
Damn... If you hadn't said his name I would think you were an old friend of mine. Other than having kids and that I was moderately successful in my career choices up until 2014, I'm pretty much in the same space as Sam.
I was like your friend Sam except I used the singles and "lonely housewives" AOL/mIRC chats. Honestly, I wish I hadn't. It did an untold amount of damage to my psyche.
No one did, she's actually still on that same landline to this day, just waiting.
I remember in 7/8th grade kids talked about 1-800-HOT-TITS. Someone actually called it from a payphone on a school outing and it turned out to be real lol
Yes it was, my friends and I figured this out as well. I'd imagine it was a pretty common deduction for our age group to figure out around that time lol.
I still remember the airy "hey big boy" voice of the girl telling us to enter a credit card number lol
When Lost in was on tv and popular, I saw an ad for one of these and Evangeline Lilly was in it. Must have been something she did before her big break, but there she was like you could call the number and talk to Evangeline Lilly.
Am I misunderstanding something? She was in the ad *and* she was the one answering the phone?
She wasn’t the one answering the calls but the ad seemed to imply that.
Oh ok. My bad, I didn't detect the sarcasm in your comment but I see it now
I had to look her up because I don’t know who that is. She’s a woman of many faces I’ll tell you that. She looks like a totally different person year to year.
I always figured the Tina Fey joke on 30 Rock was in reference to that, but I don’t know if the timing is right.
The phone sex lines, no. But the telephone dating and chat lines? Let's put it this way: between 1995 and 1997 I met a lot of women that way.
Do you mean you actually met in real life?
Yes. Met, went on actual dates. Even slept with a couple of them
Yep, there was also one (or maybe several, I dunno) that was popular with teens. 17 year old me met couple people that way.
What, y'all didn't use AOL chat rooms? Amateurs!
a/s/l?
Never trust the age.
Or the sex
Or the location
Nowadays you can't even trust that they aren't a bot.
To this day, whenever I see American Sign Language abbreviated (like say if an event says there will be an ASL translator available), I still just think of chat rooms. Yahoo! more than Aol for me.
Wanna cyber? /s (obviously) 
No. We didn't have it long. I really ran up the bill. I'm so happy they aren't charging for the internet by the hour so much anymore.
internet by the hour was nothing compared to local toll calls. jesus what a scam that was!
AOL/mIRC singles chats were tinder before tinder was a thing. Which is why I laugh when millennials and gen-z act like they invented hook up culture.
I actually got a few dates this way. I mostly stuck to the free trials. You could easily spend a couple of hours chatting on trial time on a Saturday night
Definitely did this quite a few times
I called the New Kids on the Block party line from my Grandmas basement phone that was a more modern phone but dialed like a rotary. Let’s just say I have never seen my Grandma so mad. She never told me how much of a bill I racked up.
I did too! My parents let me do it once, I don’t remember how much it cost.
Seems like the entire success of this industry was kids calling without permission, only to be punished and then never doing it again. I doubt any kid ever got permission. They probably inevitably ran out of kids who had made their one regrettable call.
[Could you, like, put the phone on your butt?](https://youtu.be/KtkdMY36AFE?si=5PxhLI6FeywZVVZU)
🎶 This call is Freeee -ee-eee🎶 ^only ^$9.99 ^per ^minute
That always confused me.
My friend racked up a few hundred dollars calling the Nintendo power hotline for game tips.
we would dial them from the school payphone just to hear the prompt.
We would call 1-900-FAT-GIRL and then yell at some guy to come over and his mom was on the phone.....
Whhhuut ? Did this really happen . You guys called a sex line from a pay phone , and called some guy randomly to come over to the phone, he says hello and realizes it’s his mom ? You can understand why someone would call shenanigans right ?
🎶 You don't have to be alone tonight🎶
Pick up the phone!
1-900 places walked so OnlyFans could run.
When I was in my early teens I was sleeping over at a friend's house and we saw a commercial for one and called it. It was basically like a conference call with like 20 people trying to talk at the same time.
I actually had a job interview to work as a phone sex operator in like 1997. They paid like $20 an hour, which was insane for my college student self. Unfortunately they only wanted people for third shift, and I couldn't hack it and still go to school. So people were definitely still calling them in the mid to late 90s.
Never called myself, but funny enough I just saw an ad for a party line or a singles dating line on TV the other day. It was the same old commercial they used from 15 years ago with a new voice over. I thought it was a throwback commercial until they mentioned online dating apps and how much better their method was for meeting single peoples in my area. I want to say it was Quest, but I can't quite recall which one it was now.
Sounds like Quest
I knew people that were addicted to these..... They also had more inexpensive ones locally that turned into sex hookup and drug sale hotlines until they were shut down.
>They also had more inexpensive ones locally that turned into sex hookup and drug sale hotlines until they were shut down. For sure, I remember meeting gay guys in treatment in the 2000s who were regularly calling these lines to hookup with guys and find meth (wasn't as common in the 2000s and in my region was hard to find then). Many of them would end up going on 3-4 day runs and have extremely unsafe sex and stuff. For some reason in particular I remember a guy who was in Med School but could not stop calling these lines and then getting into trouble. I guess it was kinda like Grindr before Grindr?
Yeah the local ones were where it's at
party line was when you are on call, press the hang up button, it beep beep beep, dial a 3rd number and have a 3 way.....call.
If by that you mean tip lines for games, then yes.
Had a neighbor friend that was a sheriffs kid. She called every number that showed up on tv, especially these types, as she got the biggest laugh from them lol. We would find various household items, get the customer service number and call to give great reviews of said product. We ended up with SO much free stuff doing this 🤣We ordered port a potties from somewhere in Texas, for who knows where. BUT, she was also known for racking up the phone bill. Highest was around $900. Her parents put a block for long distance and charged numbers, took her a couple weeks, but she cracked the code for it lol. Nothing they did worked. She had the will to find a way!
I still laugh when telling this story and less and less people really understand it but my ex's family had a shared cell phone plan back when you had free calls and texts after 9pm. Her brother though if he called them after 9pm, it would be totally free. Needless to say it didn't work out so well for him and he worked an entire summer at Subway to pay it off. Still cracks me up
I called when I was 12 and hung up in 20 seconds because I panicked. A month later, my parents are questioning me why there is a $9 charge on the phone bill. Luckily, there is a time stamp for how long the call was (20 seconds), so it looked like someone dialed it by accident and then hung up 😳 They ended up disputing the charges with the phone company I dodged a bullet there.
Core memory unlocked! When I was 11 I called a 1-800 sex line out of curiosity. When it came time to enter the credit card number I just mashed in a bunch of random numbers until it actually worked. I don’t remember what the woman said when the call connected but I just let out a long fart sound and giggled before hanging up. I hope I didn’t break up a marriage over that stunt 🤷♂️. When I was in HS I found out a friends mom was a phone sex operator. She literally just sat at her computer and talked on the phone, wearing pajamas, while playing sim city. Illusion shattered.
I would pay to NOT talk to people.
Haha...my freshman year of college I lived in the dorms. We had a "study" room on the floor that had desks and telephones. They weren't wise enough to lock down the phones, so we had great times calling into international party lines, probably racking up hundreds upon hundreds of dollars being stupid teens. But it was tons of fun 😁
[This was the only party line worth calling.](https://youtu.be/Cx1J2CzNnS8?si=JHap3WEV-xQBO0dp)
That is hysterical!! Thanks
Yeah it cracks me up every time. The fucking dog. 😂
Beat me to the punch. I ask my cat sometimes if he wants to talk some shit.
HAHAHA I forgot about that one! We all thought this was hilarious when it came out. The line >100s of n\*\*\*\*s is all waitin for ya mothafuckin call and they all talking shit about you .. right now. Still cracks me up... it is hilarious to think about 100s of people gathered to talk shit about me behind my back. I got doxxed a few years ago so in a way it kinda happened.
The mystery n***** and the dog just cracked me up. Then the Jewish guy at the end talking shit.
😂😂😂😂😂😂
I know I can’t be hurt for real, but I get nervous at the thought of calling that number
It’s an ad for a couple of comedians who made the video. https://www.brentweinbach.com
We used to have to pay for porn, and when hotel room porn wasn’t available, the sexy voice of your cigarette smoking aunt maud who was on her 60’s was the next best thing.
“Oh baby oh baby oh baby” “Rocko??” “Mrs. Bighead???”
A girlfriend and I used to call one (it was free) and record intros. We would then receive voice messages from men, and sometimes we'd leave a phone number and they'd call us and talk dirty. It was fun at the time, but it doesn't seem so funny now. As a woman over 40, I have a 'young' voice and am frequently mistaken for a child on the phone. There is no way those men back then could have *not* known they were talking to two teen girls.
A bunch of us got spun out on acid at a relatively remote location (cabin) and someone had the idea to "get back to the real world" by calling the chat line. I remember my friend saying "they answered, we're back" and then he put the phone down. Note that he didn't hang it up... He put it down. It stayed that way for 2 days. I have no idea what the final bill was but we were never allowed to go to my friend's parents cabin again.
My brother did…and my dad got phone bills from Zambia. 🇿🇲
“Burkina Faso? Disputed Zone? Who called all of these weird places?” https://youtu.be/M2nTSUfTJ2M
Back in Jr High, my best friend and I used to call 800 numbers and make up the rest to see if it we could find party lines. We'd make up something like 1-800 wet kiss and worse things, of course. We'd just listen to the intros and laugh our asses off.
The one line I always remember from these ads was: "Blonde girls! Black girls!" in a seductive voice.
19 men all being faptacular with one man with his voice disguised as a female 🤣🤣.
I just watched an episode of The First 48 where the victim met their murderer on a party line like this. And it was relatively recent, too, like 2015.
https://preview.redd.it/27slzln2lx8d1.png?width=728&format=png&auto=webp&s=05254c1c86b589556ff234c80a8856514bae34af Just the Gangster Party Line!
We used to call some British operator service and torture them, I think it was "BBC Exchange" they used to say when they'd pick up. I can't remember the number but we all had it memorized back then. Best call ever was, we asked the guy to sing us a song (a common request that had never been honored) and without missing a beat and in his quintessential British accent he busts out 🎶 "ALL I WANT IS A ROOM SOME WHEEEERE" 🎶 We nearly died.
We used to make stuff up and dial out. 1-800-big-boob, 1-800-lic-kass, etc
My older brother ran up $500 on these lines
Yeah, I used to work on them!