Jenny and the FCC

There was a point in the early 1980s when, if I asked you what Jenny’s phone number was and you said “I don’t know,” I would assume you were either a goddam liar or maybe somebody of my grandparent’s generation.  You were certainly somebody who didn’t listen to the music on the radio, because Tommy Tutone had made Jenny and her phone number, 867-5309, about as famous as any phone number has or ever will be, with the single 867-5309/Jenny.

Straight from 1982

This, naturally, led to an epic amount of crank calling… and not even crank calling, really.  People would just call the number and ask for Jenny.

The thing is, the number in the song was without an area code, which meant it could have been any area code within the North American Numbering Plan, which meant it was a misery to anybody who had that number anywhere within said numbering plan.

If you had that number you were getting dozens to hundreds to thousands of calls daily… or, more likely, nightly… depending on the population of your particular area code.

Here in Silicon Valley the 867 prefix was associated with a central office switch in the upscale Saratoga suburb in the western end of the valley.

While the song only made it to 16 on the Billboard Top 100 chart for 1982, that was popular enough for everybody who had that phone number to change it with no forwarding notification.  There were news stories about people being driven crazy by the constant calls and threats of lawsuits and a minor media storm about the whole thing, but it settled down once people did the practical thing and we all moved on.

Sort of.

I mean, somebody would hear the song, think that dialing the number was going to be hilarious, then end up with the local network “The number you have reach has been disconnected or is no longer in service” message and move on.

Of course, some idiots are more persistent than others, and I can be quite persistent when I’ve had enough to drink.  So one evening in 1985, sitting around in our apartment with nothing to do on a Sunday night in the middle of summer… Silicon Valley was (and remains) somewhat provincial, with stores not often not open on Sunday or closing early… and it was August and the web was still a decade away from being a thing and there was nothing worth watching on TV and we had watched our rented videos already, when the song came on the radio that was playing.  For us it was practically an “oldie” at this point, three years down the line.

But we immediately hit on the idea of calling that number… because of course we did.

We had a phone with a primitive speakerphone option, so we could all hear what was going on as we dialed.

Of course, the local one in the 408 area code was the disconnected message we all expected, as was 415 and 209 and 213 and 717 and other area codes we remembered.

Having run those out, we got out the phone book and started going through the area codes listed in the dialing instructions section at the front of the book.

I guess we all get along okay without ten pages of “how to make a phone call” instructions for different situations these days, though it helps that area codes don’t have much meaning and, within the US at least, long distance calls are part of all but the cheapest phone plan, so there is no additional cost to call any place in the country.

This was not the case on a landline, either back then or today, but there was no long distance charge for reaching an out of service number.  You only got charged if you connected to a live line and somebody answered.  This meant we were not too worried about randomly calling across the country because we didn’t really expect anybody to pick up… and if they did, it would be worth the effort because we would be asking about Jenny.

As we marched across the area codes in the US, we did get, in hindsight, a tour of the different messages that local phone companies used for a disconnected number.  AT&T had been broken up at that point and we were at the moment of maximum phone companies in the US.  There had always been some regional phone companies outside of the Bell System(tm), but now there was no big bad death star running most of the show, and the AT&T name was strictly about long distance at the moment and was soon to be fighting it out with Sprint and MCI over that market.

Anyway, we kept calling, never getting an answer.  But we hit one area code where the disconnected message read back the number to us rather than being a generic message.  And it read it back in that slightly nasal phone company operator voice that was made high art by Lily Tomlin with her Ernestine the operator bits on Laugh-In back in the day.

Even back then doing this wasn’t rocket science.  I have seen the code to do that in half a dozen languages over the years and have written a similar routine myself in at least three development environments.  But it wasn’t something most phone companies thought worth bothering with.

And, as a message, it was both hilarious to me at the time, and so perfect that we called it back a few times just to hear it over and over.

Then I had an idea.  I went over to my room, unplugged my Phone Mate answering machine, plugged it in again by the speaker on the phone.

Literally this model, the picture of which I found via Google

Then we called back again and I recorded the whole thing, making it the outgoing message on my answering machine.

This seemed ideal for me.  It was both silly and, due to the quirks of the phone system, my number was one digit off from the Sears Appliance repair line over at Vallco Mall, a location which I referenced in a previous post, which meant I got more than the occasional wrong number.

So now every rando calling my number got the outgoing message in that officious phone company tone of voice:

The number you have reached, eight six seven five three oh nine, has been disconnected or is no longer in service.  If you feel you have reached this recording in error please try dialing again or contact an operator.

That was preceded by the familiar warning tones, which you probably heard in your head by the time I mentioned them if you’re of the right age.

Hilarious.

People who knew me were not phased, and people who did not were confused.

However, the confused were really confused, and in retrospect I think I know how I ended up getting busted for this.

There was an older couple that were regularly calling that Sears number about some appliance they bought that needed service and they wanted somebody to come out and look at it.  However, they never seemed to pay any mind to my outgoing message, which at one point said something along the lines of “This is not Sears, call the right number you numbskull,” and left a series of ongoing and increasingly resentful and angry messages about how nobody had gotten back to them about their appliance and blah blah blah.

The new message stopped them.  Victory.  I went a few weeks where nobody left any messages beyond people who were in on the joke, which was fine with me.  Most effective outgoing message ever.

However, I suspect that old couple was upset by the fact that their phone was not connecting them to the number they were dialing.  I suspect they tried over and over, tried from a friend’s house, tried getting the operator to connect them, called the Pacific Bell service line to see if there was any problem, at which point all of this may have been elevated to the level of the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC.

That was when I got the call.

I came home from work and found a message on my machine.  That message was from somebody who identified themselves by name… I’ve long since forgotten then name… and said they were from a specific department of the FCC and that they had a complaint escalated to them about my outgoing message, the content of which was against FCC regulations about… I don’t remember… maybe falsely impersonating the phone company and its messaging.  It has been almost 40 years, I don’t remember.  But the upshot was to change my outgoing message or my line would be disconnected.  They would check back in a week.

In hindsight, it might have been a gag, or somebody at the phone company just trying to get me to knock that shit off… though the phone company generally had little compunction about about turn off lines for little or no reason… but its bland reasonableness in tone felt like the government.  No bluster, as my friends might have done, just “comply or we’ll have your phone service cut off.”

Now, at my age, I would have told the government to pound sand.  But 20 year old me was a lot more willing to believe in the omniscience and power of the government and was more deferential because of it.

Still, I have always had problems with authority, so I didn’t want to simply buckle and go back to some bland “leave a message” replacement.

So I took the recording of the FCC representative telling me they were going to cut off my phone service, complete with his name in the introduction, and made that my outgoing message.

I never heard back from him, the phone company, or the couple so pissy at Sears regarding some appliance they had purchased.  And, some months later we were asked to leave that apartment due to a New Years Eve party that received multiple complaints and at least three visit from the local police department.  We did not get our security deposit back, the mess from the party being so bad that the cleaning crew wrote in their report that they were sure we had been keeping several large dogs in the house.

Lesson: Always put the keg in the back yard and not in the house.