RateItAll: The Opinion Network

In England there was (there may well still be, I don't know) a free phone helpline called 'Sex Line', designed and put in place to help teenagers with any sexual issues they may have. Of course, you can guess what happened... but in my defence, my friends and I always made sure that we made our antics funny. More often than not, we got a laugh out of them, and considering how tiring manning a phoneline where over half of the calls received are amateur sexual innuendo from amateur teens, I considered that quite a feat...

Talk about embarrassing;when I was 17 and senior year just started this new guy moved to our school and I developed a huge crush on him..but he was shy I guess,and I actually worked up the nerve to ask him for his phone number,any how after he gave it to me,instead of just calling him,I got very nervous and would dial the number but hang up before I heard the phone actually ring...I guess I did that about 20 times. I decided to just wait on him to call me I was just too scared,about 30 minutes later he did,I was so happy he called,then crushed and mortified when he asked had I been calling him because my name had showed up on id,I thought the phone had to ring 2 times for it too register.he thought it was funny,but I have never forgotton that day.It simply was the most embarrassing thing that has happened so far.

A teenager before caller ID-guilty!

Ah the age before caller id, *69 or 1471 and 141 over here in the UK. Anybody who was a tennager before that age and says they didn't make crank calls is flat out lying. It was all part of being a teenager. You had a wild crush on someone and didn't have the guts to ask them out or tell them you would call their house to make that dreaded call of them being present before you talk to them.

One of my friends would come over every weekend for some time and we would pick numbers from the phone book. Then we would find certain letters within the numbers to make a theme out of it for each call. We called it code calling. it wasn't nice but we were just kids.

oh yeah!! A few times when I was a teen. I had no caller ID way back then. Nothing horrible, just silly teenager hijinx.

We thought that was for kids- we went out and burned/broke stuff. . .

Of course.Isn't it a rite of passage?

Ah for the golden days before caller ID and the like. Right now, I bet that IJR IS waiting for numbah to pick up the phone so he can ask numbah if he has Prince Albert in a can.

Nope. Never really cared to.

I wish I could say I'm embarassed by this, but actually it's one of my favorite memories. For some reason, our city had party lines for a few years - and my buddies and I could listen in on some interesting conversations. We had a couple of older ladies who talked on the phone a lot, so we put a tape recorder up to the receiver and recorded a few seconds of their talking, then would suddenly play back their own voices to them. They'd get spastic, wondering what was happening and their reactions were priceless...you'd think people from outer space had invaded or something. Other times we would make hilarious sound effects into the phone while they were talking, so each caller would think the other was having stomach trouble. We also had a family on our party line with a teenage girl who had a huge crush on my older brother. She lived several miles from our neighborhood and of course had no idea that her gossip with other teen girls (often about my brother) was being listened to by me and one of my friends. And right in the middle of their chit-chat, we'd interrupt and tell them my brother didn't even like them. This girl would bawl me out and claim I didn't even know the boy she was talking about! Fun times......look, if you lived in the same dull city in Indiana that I did in those days, you'd understand why this type of thing qualified as entertainment.

I don't know of anyone who did not do this as a kid........