B.G.S.F.H.

Aah the Bastard Operator from Hell, highly recommended reading. The man I would have been if only I had had more recourses at my disposal. But where does a boy go to get a bulk disk eraser or a mains plug that patches into Ethernet (ok I could have made one of those) in Fairfield Iowa?

Instead I hacked. The vernacular has changed since then, now it's called "cracking" but back then I was called a hacker. I tortured the school system's limited resources. I phreaked the local phone company in my little po-dunk town so hard that to this day I'm fairly certain that the resulting anomalies mandated their complete system overhaul in 1983. That poor old switch was just never made to handle 30 calls a minute coming from a residential branch… those, as they say, were the good old days.

I saw what happened to KM and I'm not stupid enough to report on line (or elsewhere) any of my little escapades but here's an interesting little story about other kinds of fun than can be had with a war dialer and a couple of sophomore punks.

In the basement of the house I lived in in grad school (the first time) lived three 19-year-old "dudes." They were all right kids; I actually kind of liked them but they were young and stupid and full of energy. A lethal combination.

One Thursday night, while I was trying to grade papers, they decided to have a party. Not a real party but a couple of girls over, play the music real loud, order pizza and mooch beer (because they're underage) from upstairs neighbor (me) party.

That's cool, I'm generally a live-and-let-live kind of guy, to a point, so I went off to my favorite pub to grade my papers. When I returned close to 2 am, however, they still had the tunes cranked. I was too tired to go and make them stop so the noise went on for a couple more hours before they decided to pipe down for the night. Needless to say I was tired and cranky a few hours after that when I had to get up at 8 to go to class.

I had a half an hour to kill before class and decided that a little reciprocation was in order. I thought about playing the stereo loud but had to consider the other people in the house so I settled onto a slightly more subversive plan. I logged on to the university phone directory and pulled up their phone number -bonus, they had two lines. Then I set my computer to call their numbers at random time intervals from 5 to 45 minutes (meaning that there would never be more than an hour and a half between calls), I set it for bad line quality so it would screech like hell double-checking for a modem at the other end. Sweet dreams punks. Ring, ring, ring… ", I got it, hello? aah! Damn computers!"

After enjoying the first couple of minutes of my little plan I took off for class in a decidedly better mood. By lunchtime I'd already forgotten all about my little revenge tactic so when I went back to my apartment for a few minutes at three and threw some things in a bag and headed out the door for a weekend in Chicago I never thought to turn off my computer which was still happily dialing away.

On Sunday I returned to find two of my young neighbors sitting outside on my steps. "What's up guys?" I sat down and joined them for a few minutes before heading inside. "Nothin' much, dude. Just hanging out."

Just then I heard their phone ring and in a split second I realized why they weren't inside, one of them winced when he heard the sound and I had to bite my tongue to keep from smiling. "Aren't you going to get that?" I asked. "Nah, someone's crank calling us - been going on all weekend." Clueless.

I looked into their faces, there were bags under their eyes. My plan had worked much better than I thought. But how?

"You could just unplug your phone." I offered. "We unplugged ours," they simpered, "but it's Jason's phone too, he's been out of town since Thursday afternoon. He locked his room and we can't get to it…"

I excused myself and went inside to keep from laughing my ass off. I let the computer continue to dial them a few more hours so they wouldn't associate my return with the end of the calls. Then at around 9 I pulled the plug on my little game, checked my email and went to bed early. Things were amazingly quiet around the house that night

Don't mess with the Bastard Grad Student from Hell, (L)users.