Is your refrigerator STILL running?

Anyone remember how much fun prank calling was? If you were a child of the 80s (or prior), I know you share those fond memories. I wonder how many hours my friends and I dedicated to the feckless torture of strangers and friends alike. I'd estimate our stranger-to-friend target ratio was about 2:1.

Strangers were always on the receiving end of a scenario where I, Sunshine McGee (my prank-call name), was calling from some fake airline to confirm their reservation to Australia. Endless hilarity ensued. Reactions ranged from light-hearted incredulity to hardcore resistance. It was like a box of chocolates...well, you know how the saying goes.

Friends (and more commonly "frenemies"), would be confronted with the magically-random opportunity to answer a trivia question for a pair of movie tickets. Nevermind that we claimed to be calling from a radio station in Dallas (which is a two-and-a-half hour drive from the kids we were punking) and frequently had to ask their parents for them by name if we didn't recognize their voices when the phone was answered. There were several occasions in which the victim would correctly answer the trivia question and we would tell them that they had an hour to come to the station to pick up their prize. Invariably, this would lead to whining, begging, and sometimes an argument in which we were sometimes forced to revoke the prize due to insubordination. Frequently, the call was cut short when the architects of this telephonic teasing (us) would start laughing uncontrollably.

But then caller ID came along and ruined everything. With all the conveniences technology has brought us, it sure has managed to take the fun out of some things. Now the closest thing to prank calling is to crash a stranger's blog and leave a tacky comment. That's kind of pointless since you don't get the instant gratification of witnessing the reaction first-hand.

There are some people I would love to prank-call. Bill O'Reilly tops my list. Given the right set of circumstances and a good back-story, I bet I could get a cuss word out of him within two minutes. Alce Baldwin is a close second (if he calls his own daughter a "selfish little pig", imagine the insults he reserves for a stranger....from Texas, no less) and Rosie O'Donnell rounds out my top three. All three of them take themselves WAAAAY too seriously and need to be brought down a few notches.

I have better things to do now....or so society dictates. Seriously, I do have a house I'm trying to unload. It appears that there aren't hoards of people out there waiting for five acres and a cat. (Actually, the cat is not included on the listing but everything is negotiable).