I’ve set up a page for the prank calls we’ve made to people who like to complain about businesses on Twitter. It’s at www.phonelosers.org/complainers. Go listen to me, Matt and Legend screw with complainers.

I’ve also updated our page of PLA music with gnnr’s new Mildred Monday song, my Curtis Lee Jones song, RTF’s Bell Odyssey and Trevelyn’s Ode to the PLA Forums.

And speaking of Mildred Monday, I’ve updated the PLA Memorial with a page dedicated to Mildred Monday. Go there and you can listen to most of the calls we made to her in the 1990s.

If you’ve been watching our YouTube page you’ve probably noticed a lot of answering machine hacking contests to win the PLA book. Congratulations to Mario, Finn and Liz for winning free copies of the PLA book! We’ll probably keep having answering machine contests as long as I can continue to find more old answering machines. If you’re too lazy to hack an answering machine for a book, you can still preorder books for just $10.

2 Comments

This week I was at Goodwill and picked up an old answering machine, just for the hell of it. When I got home, I made a YouTube video, challenging people to hack the machine for a chance to win a free PLA book. I expected the machine to get hacked by morning, but it’s been several days now and still nobody has managed to hack it, despite receiving over 500 calls to it so far. What the hell, people?

So now I’m posting about it on here, in hopes that more people will try and it’ll get done before next week, because that’s when I’ll be boxing up the answering machine and returning it to Goodwill to exchange it for another machine that I will also hook up to a phone line and challenge people to hack. Goodwill has a nice selection of old answering machines, all priced under $5.00, so my plan is to keep doing this until the book comes out. After each machine is hacked, I’ll get a new one and you can try again. Maybe I’ll find some cool cassette tape machines for you to play with.

So give it a try. The phone number is 213-787-5552. The current machine on my phone line is a Radio Shack model 43-3829. To let me know that the machine has been hacked, you have to change the outgoing message on it, then immediately email me to let me know exactly how you did it. Hopefully I’ll be able to confirm that you really hacked it before someone else comes along and changes the message again.

If you’re too lazy to hack my answering machine, you can always preorder the book instead.

1 Comment

Below are all of the entries from our pumpkin carving contest, in no particular order. If you still want to submit one today (November 1st), go ahead and I’ll add it to the list. Thanks for the entries, everyone! The winner will be announced on Monday night’s Phone Show so make sure to listen!

Here’s an entry by t0rx:

Here’s some minimal effort by Matt E:

A pay phone by Interrupt Handler:

Interrupt Handler attempting to outdo Altalp’s PLA entry from last year:

Skunkworks RBCP face transfer pumpkin, done using this method:

Matt and Janet’s entry:

David’s entry:

1 Comment

Matt and Janet from Arizona sent in these amazing PLA pumpkins today. Nice! There’s only a few days left for the PLA pumpkin carving contest, so get your submissions sent to brad at phonelosers dot org ASAP!

And this is completely unrelated to the pumpkin carving contest, but here’s some really cool PLA Radio art work, sent to us by Phrank from the PLA Forums.

You can click on the PLA Radio image to see more of Phrank’s artwork. Thanks, Phrank! Oh and if any of you agree with the sentiment of loving Trevelyn’s mom, you should join the Facebook group about it.

1 Comment

As announced earlier this month, you can win a PLA t-shirt by carving a PLA themed pumpkin and sending the picture to BRAD at phonelosers.org. So far there are only 2 entries:

The first is by RBCP, who is disqualified from the contest for being an employee of PLA. The 2nd is from David in California. So David is in the lead! Keep David from winning a PLA shirt by sending in your own submissions before November 1st. HURRY!

2 Comments

The PLA Prank Call Contest is officially over and you can now vote on your favorite entry below. Click on the button of your favorite prank call, then click on the “Submit Your Vote” button at the bottom. You’ll be taken to a page of the current voting results. You can also click here to see the current voting results.

Please don’t cheat. I know it can be done and it’s been done before. It’s not that hard or impressive and it will be sort of obvious if you are. So please…don’t cheat. The voting will end whenever I feel like ending it. Maybe in a week or two, I guess? If you’d like to see the current voting results, here they are.

I’m going to give out 3 prize packages for the top 3 winners. It’ll go something like this – the first place winner gets to pick the 10 tapes/CDs he wants, the 2nd place winner gets to pick 10 of the remaining 10 tapes/CDs, and 3rd place gets the rest of the crap that’s left. Everyone who entered will receive a PLA Media DVD and a DVD full of my entire prank call collection. Once again, lots of thanks to everyone who entered the contest!

5 Comments

Before we get into the prank call contest entries, here’s a quick site update…you can now receive emails whenever new content and updates are posted to phonelosers.org. We were using Feedblitz to accomplish this before, but it was slow and they probably sold your email address to Nigerians. The new system emails you immediately after entries are posted and you’re not giving up your email address to a 3rd party company. You can use the form below to sign up. Or you can just keep using the RSS feed like a normal person.

Now on to the contest entries! There have been quite a few entries that don’t follow the rules of this contest. People are sending in just regular prank calls that have nothing to do with the PLA. And one person send in a deaf relay call transcript. Sorry people, but I’m only accepting PLA-themed prank calls for this contest. Here’s are the current entries.

• Tachyon’s 1st Entry: Cactusing a 7-Eleven
  
• Tachyon’s 2nd Entry: Cactusing some other business
  
• z3wb’s 1st Entry: z3wb violates some FCC laws in this homage to our What’s Yer Bid phone mob.
  
• z3wb’s 2nd Entry: And some more of the same.
  Harry’s Entry (part 1, part 2, part 3): Harry’s pranks a hotel and tells the front desk that someone peed in his room.
  
• Sam’s Entry: Sam calls a Wal-Mart and claims to have scammed a computer from them, just like our old modem scam prank on the PLA’s Wal-Mart Page.

That’s it for now. Thanks to everyone who’s submitted calls so far. Keep the PLA-themed calls coming because you still have until January 15th to win some prank call CDs and tapes!

10 Comments

As mentioned in PLA Radio #15, I’m starting up a new contest. The Win RBCP’s Old Prank Call Tapes and CDs Contest! I recently converted my remaining cassette tapes and CDs to mp3s, most of which happened to be prank calls. So now I’m left with several dozen prank call tapes and CDs that I have no use for. So I’m using this contest as a guise for offloading my old crap onto some unsuspecting prank caller who thinks they’re actually winning something cool. I’m a genius!

If you would like to win this excellent collection of prank call history (aka crappy old prank tapes, lots with terrible sound quality) then all you have to do is submit a prank call that you’ve made. Not just any prank call, though. It must be a PLA-themed prank call. Your prank call must include something done in the spirit of the PLA, such as cactusing someone, calling someone from the PLA’s past, reenacting an prank call or an event from our site, or just doing something generally PLA-ey. Get it?

How many of these prank call cassetes/CDs I give out to each winner will depend on how many entries there are and how much effort you put into it. If there’s a lot of entries, I’ll probably let the first place winner have first choice, the second place winner have second choice, etc. If you need some help on how to record your telephone calls, click here for a tutorial. Here’s a semi-complete list of the tapes and CDs you could win:

• The CranKings – Sushi and Friends Act I (copied cassette)
  
• The Teleprankers Volume 1 and 2 (copied cassette)
  
• Frank Da Prank (copied cassette)
  
• Screamers (copied cassette)
  
• Benny Calls Volume 3 (copied cassette)
  
• Jerky Boys bootleg (copied cassette)
  
• Jerky Boys Bud Light commercials (copied cassette)
  
• The Ball Busters (copied cassette)
  
• The Musacha Tapes (cassette)
  
• John Lancaster SPEAKS (copied cassette)
  
• Phone Losers of America Give Me Liberty or Give Me Steak (copied cassette)
  
• Jenn Redmond (copied cassette)
  
• Mark Knofler (copied cassette)
  
• Phone Pride World Wide (all 4 of his CDs)
  
• Bubba Johnson & Company (copied cassette)
  
• The Phone Heads (copied cassette)
  
• Dumbass (CD-R)
  
• Garson Landfil (CD-R)
  
• Go With The Flow (CD-R)
  
• Tube Bar (cassette)
  
• John Trubee – Great Phone Calls (CD-R)
  
• Telephone Head (CD-R)
  
• PLA Raw Material – Volumes 1 – 5) (CD-R)
  
• 976-GIRLS (CD-R)
  
• Phone Losers of America Give Me Liberty or Give Me Steak (real CD from mp3.com)

There’s a little more of it, but some of it is commercially available stuff and I probably shouldn’t mention that I’m giving away CD-Rs of their work. There’s some great prank callers in the mix and some crappy ones. But it’s all fun stuff to listen to. The contest officially starts today and it officially ends on January 15th, 2007. You can submit your pranks by email to rbcp AT phonelosers.org or post them in the forums. Get to work!

10 Comments