Reading the Pro Revenge stories on Reddit today bounced a memory from when I was working as a contractor at SRP (the power utility) in Phoenix, AZ in 1997.
My coworker Tim had a girlfriend, and she and he made plans to go to Las Vegas over a long weekend to celebrate their 3 year anniversary. However, that girlfriend was also cheating on him.
Tim found out. Tim knew the NuDude, too. Tim decided to play it cool, and plan…
Tim broke up with his girl a few days before The Big Trip. He initiated the breakup by calmly telling her that he knew about NuDude, and had for a while, and that she should make other plans for The Big Trip Weekend, and that she should move her shit out of the apartment before then, and she did.
Friday rolls around and Tim takes off for Las Vegas with his best friend, Raphael. The two of them totally intent on partying the pain away in a way that only Las Vegas Movie Montage can provide.
But before he left…he put his 1997-era ‘hacker’ skills to work, and the execution was sublime.
He wrote a little script for his modem dialer program (yay, dialup!). In the 602 area code (back in the day) two prefixes (20,000 numbers) were dedicated exclusively to pagers. His dialer script dialed each number in those two prefixes sequentially, paused 5 seconds, added his (now ex-) GF’s number, a space, and 911, then hung up, waited between 5-10 seconds, then did the same for NuDude’s number, and then moved on to the next number.
The result was that MOST people ignored the 911 page from a number they didn’t recognize. But SOME of them responded when they got a SECOND 911 page from a number they didn’t recognize, and still others responded to the first one… “Uh…yeah….someone just paged me from this number?” at all hours of the day and night for 4 days straight, while Tim and Raphael partied it up in Las Vegas.
