Hello to all,
“Is your refrigerator running?”
“Yes!”
“You better go catch it,” as laughter ruins the punchline.
Every male and half the women over forty have a story about crank-calling someone by using this type of joke on them. Another famous gag was calling a store selling tobacco products and asking if they had Prince Albert in a can. The funniest reply was, "You better let him out." These puns were passed around on schoolyard playgrounds for boys to try at home. The puns became more explicit in junior and senior high but just as annoying.
People under forty did not find these crank calls as funny as previous generations because of caller ID. Phone companies developed caller ID and sold it as an extra on people’s monthly bill. As with other technologies, it became cheap to run caller ID to stop crank calls by identifying the culprit by the mid-nineties. A quick phone call to the parents put the retribution on the caller instead of the mark for the prank.
I managed a pizza shop in the mid-nineties. A call interrupted my afternoon prep with a young man trying to sound like an adult. He ordered two large pizzas for a number that did not match the ID on the wall. I called the number on the screen to verify the order. It was the local body shop that called us regularly for pizzas, subs, and other hot food. He knew the boy who was trying to sound like an adult. The echo through the phone of the grandfather yelling at his offspring was heartwarming.
The second incident happened shortly after on a busy Friday night. A young teenage boy crank-called with the old standbys mentioned before. They continued with a barrage of insulting noises and foul language. The crank calls kept disturbing our evening, even after threatening to call the boys’ parents. The rush died down a few hours later, and I called. The father answered the phone and became unhappy with my report. Fifteen minutes later, dad and son walked through our door. The father crossly made his woeful son apologize to everyone working that night.
I think the devastating word of being caught spread across playgrounds worldwide, for crank calls were no longer viable because of caller ID. I never received another. Generation X was the last of the kids to feel the unbridled glee of a well-placed crank call to an unsuspecting adult with impunity as the tradition of running refrigerators, and Prince Albert died with caller ID.
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God bless,
Danny Mac
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