My brother (who is also my roomate) has always had a unique way of dealing with telephone salespeople....He talks to them. and talks and talks and talks.....It is always very interesting to hear.  One night about mid-night I decided I wanted to hear him do it again, but I wasn't aware of any tele-marketers that were planning to call (especially that late), so I decided to play a joke on him and create the call myself.

On Sprint's web page they have a Call Back feature.  You enter your telephone number and within a few seconds your phone rings.  When you pick it up it says, "Thank you for using Sprint," you hear one or two rings, and an operator asks how they can help you.

I had them call the room and stepped out in the hall. Michael figured it must of been me, so he didn't wait long enough to talk to the operator.  However we did get an idea.  Why did we have to use our own number in the call back feature?  It suddenly occured to us that this could the means of a very interesting prank.

We tried telling it to call Dave down the hall.  As it was calling, we went and stood outside his room.  Since both Dave and the operator thought the other person had placed the call it was pretty funny.  Dave had just gotten a new Sprint Phone card, so he thought they were calling about that.  The operator thought Dave was calling with a question about the phone card.  When they finally realized that they really didn't want to talk to each other, Dave told the operator to have a good evening and they hung up. (Dave is very polite.)

The joke on Dave turned out good, so we went back to the room and called the number across the hall from Dave.  That conversation didn't last very long, but the guy came out of his room and told Dave about the weird call he had just received from Sprint.  We called Dave's room again, but as soon as he picked up with the first operator we reset the Call Back page and entered his number again.  He was talking with the operator saying that this was the second call he had received that night when he got a call on the second line.  He asked the operator to hang on and switched over only to find yet another Sprint operator on the phone.  We heard him yell across the hall, "Sprint is calling me while they're already on the phone with me!" 

We then called all the people at Dave's end of the hall who were up.  Most of them had heard the commotion so they knew they weren't the only one to get the call.   Finally about 5 of them decided that a guy named Bryan must be down in the computer lab doing what we were actually doing from our room.  All 5 of them took off down the stairs to find Bryan. 

As they were going downstairs we had Sprint call the front desk of our dorm.   Bryan was no where to be found, but they stopped to talk to the desk attendent who said, "The strangest thing just happened......"

It was several months before we actually took credit for the prank.