Thursday, December 17, 2020

Guy Flakes On Car Sale, Coders Take Wicked Pro Revenge


Man, if there's one thing that pro revenge stories like this one teach us, it's to not flake out on a sale you previously agreed to, and to especially not mess around with any coders in this world. Coders just have a leg up when it comes to taking tactical, completely ruinous pro revenges on unsuspecting foes that simply had it coming. It sounds like the dude on the receiving end of this pro revenge had his pager stormed by hundreds, if not thousands, of wrong numbers. Pretty dang glorious. 

1.

Text - I recruited an unwitting army to annoy an asshole. Back in the early 90's, my friend (I'll call him "Lou", because that's his name) was selling his RX-7 via an ad in the old print Auto Trader. It came out every Thursday, so that first weekend was critical for sales. The very first guy that came to see it on Saturday said he wanted to buy after driving it. Of course, he had to finance, so they couldn't finish the sale during the weekend. Lou was worried about losing all the bites from the

2.

Text - Sitting around my apartment, we schemed revenge, but all we had to go on was the check. Lucky for karma, there was a phone number printed on it. Our first idea was to write a little program to dial his number repeatedly from my modem, but that would be easily stopped and probably get us in direct trouble. Then Lou got a page from his work: this was back in the one-way pager days. You call the pager's dedicated phone number, it sounds a tone, then you punch digits for the number you want t

3.

Text - Boom: angelic choir sings, heavenly light goes off. Lou's pager number and my pager number had the same prefix (middle 3 digits). What if we randomly dial numbers with that prefix and page them all to this guy's number? So we order a pizza, open some beers, and start looking through the yellow pages at locksmiths and tow truck services to find more pager prefixes. We wind up with a dozen or so. After that, it's half an hour of coding in Ye Olde Borland C++. I put together a program that w

4.

Text - We start eating the pizza and let it fly. I was very picky about my devices, so my modem was a USRobotics Courier. You could set an S register to control how long it would sound each tone when dialing. Uber-nerds like myself would keep tinkering with that to get it as fast as possible while still being recognized by the phone service. It was very fast. I swag it could run through 4 pages per minute, so this guy would get 240 calls/hour. We just watched it run and laughed our asses off. We

5.

Text - We ended up running it for a few hours, then let it go quiet for a few days. Then we scheduled it to start dialing in the middle of the night every few days, plus we'd fire it up by hand randomly whenever we had a party. We checked again from the 7-11 after a week and it went to an answering machine, which did the rapid- tone at the end of the greeting to indicate the tape was full. We reasoned that the line was still ringing, anyway, so we kept at it for another month or so. Eventually,

6.

Text - And, yeah, we annoyed several thousand people into calling this guy by the end. But each of those people was only put out for a single call. A cost, yes, but a necessary one for justice. 4 3.7k 119 ↑, Share BEST COMMENTS V

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