Posted anonymously to avoid penalties. My first phreaking experience:
I was about
13. I had come to visit my former
next-door neighbor, Adam (
names changed to protect the guilty). After I had moved out of my old house, some people (call them the
Joneses) moved in. The Joneses were away a lot on business , or maybe avoiding Adam's
music. On the night in question, they were in some
far away place having fun. Adam was behind their house, at their phone
hook-up. I was in his basement, reeling out phone cable.
Adam lived in his
basement. A few weeks ago, he had unhooked his parents' phone connection from the house, in order to lure a phone
repairman to his lair. While he distracted the unsuspecting
Bell repair guy, his friend took about
a thousand feet of phone cable, on a big reel, out of the back of the repair truck.
That reel contained the cable I was paying out to Adam, who was dragging it through the window and across his yard. Unfortunately, whoever had wrapped the
phone cord onto the reel hadn't done a very good
job. Within minutes, all
thousand feet of it were tangled into a huge knot, almost entirely filling the
closet we were working from. As I frantically worked to untangle the line so that we could reach the neighbor's house, Adam began tugging on it, tangling it further.
Eventually, we gave up and went off to do other things under the
HPVAC rubric (he ran a
BBS which included a good deal of
warez, so we were probably near the AC end). We never did get the
beige box working.