Ever been impressed at a movie character’s elite phone abilities? I sure have a few times. Here’s my collection of 10 great phone movie moments in no particular order…

David Lightman Obtains A Free Call: In Wargames, David Lightman, played by Matthew Broderick, is stuck out in the desert somewhere and desperately needs to call his girlfriend to ask for her help. But he has no money, so he finds a soda tab on the ground and uses it to create an electrical connection from the phone’s mouthpiece to the front of the pay phone, which gives him a free dial tone. From what I’ve heard, this particular trick used to actually work. It’s just too bad that you can’t find soda tabs like that all over the ground anymore.

Free Meals At Nice Restaurants: Ferris Beauller wants to scam a free meal in Ferris Beauller’s Day Off, but the restaurant guy doesn’t believe he’s really the Sausage King of Chicago. So Ferris picks up the restaurant’s phone and pretends to call the police, while actually calling the restaurant’s other phone line. When the restaurant guy finds another phone and picks up the line, it’s Ferris’ girlfriend wanting to speak with The Sausage King and helping to confirm Ferris’ fake identity. After this call, restaurant guy gets sneaky and picks up The Sausage King’s extension to eavesdrop, only to hear him speaking with the Chicago Police. Or at least his friend Cameron, pretending to be a police officer. Luckily, all adults in this movie are extremely stupid, so the plan works perfectly.

Pump Up The Volume - Cordless Beige Boxing: Near the end of this movie, we’re sure that our hero, Happy Harry Hardon, is finally caught because the authorities have traced his call as he was prank calling the school’s guidance counselor on the air with his pirate radio station. Much to everyone’s relief, we find that Harry has hidden a cordless phone base in his neighbor’s shed and that the calls were traced back to them. The police show up to arrest his elderly neighbors. I just want to know one thing - how did Harry get such a clear signal on that old 44 MHz cordless phone.

The Matrix - Traveling Through Phone Lines: You gotta be a little impressed with the characters in the Matrix, since they were somehow able to transfer themselves in and out of virtual worlds using regular copper phone lines. It’s just too bad they couldn’t figure out a way to adopt cellular technology in the same way for quick getaways from Agent Smith.

Terminator 2 - John Conner Needs A Quarter: Needing to call his foster parents to warn them about the T-1000, John asks his Terminator if he has a quarter. The terminator bashes the coin box in with one punch and quarters come pouring out of the phone. Not exactly something you can do if you don’t own a Terminator, but it was still a cool trick. Of course, we could stay that the Terminator stole this idea from Police Academy 3, when Sgt Tackleberry helped a little old lady retrieve her lost quarter from a pay phone by shooting at it with his gun. (As heard on the beginning of PLA Radio 14!) But we’ll give the Terminator the benefit of the doubt since he probably didn’t have time to watch that movie.

Diverting Calls Through 411 To Fool Caller ID: In Lindsay Lohan’s movie Mean Girls, her friend Regina isn’t happy about seeing Jason with Taylor Wedell. So she calls up Taylor’s mother. “Caller ID!” Gretchen quickly warns. But Regina knows her phone tricks - she calls 411 and asks them for the number since 411 won’t transmit your caller ID when they connect you. (According to this movie, anyway.) Regina pretends to be Planned Parenthood, calling for Taylor, and the mom freaks out. We see the results of the prank a few seconds later when the girl receives a call on her cell phone from her mother. Pretty vindictive but you gotta love Regina’s knowledge of caller ID for prank calling purposes.

Free Long Distance. Forever. In the comically bad movie, The Core, a hyperactive computer hacking genius (who they ask to hack the planet) grabs the cell phone of a passing agent. Folding a gum wrapper into a magical hacker-like shape, he uses it to whistle into the cell phone. He then tells the agent, “Here, you now have free long distance on this phone. Forever.” It’s amazing what a hacker can do with an unlimited supply of Xena tapes and Hotpockets.

Scamming Strangers Over The Phone: A couple of crafty youngsters scam a stranger with a fake lottery ticket in the beginning of the movie Ghost In The Machine. The fake lottery ticket has a phone number on the back of it to confirm the winnings. The stranger uses a pay phone to call it in, unwittingly reaching the kid’s friend who uses a voice changer to make himself sound like a female. After thinking that the ticket is valid, the stranger is ready to pay the kid a fraction of the winnings. Later in the movie you get to see a serial killer ghost track a woman’s movements from her car’s cellular phone, while switching traffic lights near her in an attempt to cause other cars to crash into her. It doesn’t get any more realistic than that!

Random Touch Tones = Free Calls: In that oh-so-technically-accurate movie called Hackers, Phantom Phreak needs to make a call from the pay phone that happens to be sitting at the table with him (WTF??). When the automated voice asked for $5.00 for the first minute, he plays a tape recording of a string of touch tones. Of course, this fools the pay phone into thinking he deposited money. What the hell is up with $5.00 for the first minute anyway? I sure don’t remember domestic phone rates being that insane in the mid-90’s. And per minute?? They always gave you 3 minutes to talk in between deposits, even for international calls.

“I called long distance - I sent 40,000 volts around the world…”: Edgar, the jealous home computer from the movie Electric Dreams, sure knows how to use a phone to make Miles’ life a living hell. He begins his reign of terror by using a service called Radio Phone to play music through Miles’ pager during a symphony. From there it escalates into authorizing ticket booths to cut up his credit cards and turning him into a wanted man at the grocery store. Edgar The Computer also becomes a regular call-in guest on The Dr. Ruth Show and he loves to call Miles at work every day to find out when he’ll be home. All from an acoustic coupler connection, somehow. The grand finale is in the end, when Edgar tells Miles that he’s used the phone to send 40,000 volts around the world in an effort to commit suicide. “Don’t be upset…I dialed toll free…”

So what’s your favorite movie phone moment? I’m sure I missed more than a few good ones. Post your favorites in the comments.

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I clicked on a Yahoo ad the other day. It’s something I’ve never done intentionally but the internet was running slow and the ad caught my eye as I was waiting for a page to come up. So I clicked on it. The ad was for Vonage Digital Voice which is another one of those telephone over the internet products. We all know that attempts at making phone calls over the net in the past have failed. The one thing that sticks out in my mind about making phone calls on the internet is the sound quality sucked. They had the ad-based free internet phones like dialpad.com out for awhile but they finally turned those all into pay services. But the only thing they were ever good for was making prank calls to people because there was no way to hold a decent conversation with all the echoing and static.

I sat and read about Vonage on their web site for about 30 minutes. It seemed like a great deal, $40 per month for unlimited long distance calling. And you’re not using your computer to make the phone calls, instead they send you a box that converts all of your home telephones into internet phones. They claim that the sound quality is just as good as a regular phone line. I don’t believe them so I start searching Google for information about Vonage. Every page I find is praising their product and their service. So I’m a little more convinced and I figure what the hell, there’s no contract so I’ll give it a try. It ends up being $80 to sign up, then $40 per month (plus taxes) after that. They ship the unit with Airborn Express just an hour after I place my order and it arrives within 4 business days.

Your New Phone Company This is the box, plug it into your internet router and you’re making free calls.

Back in September you might remember reading about my adventure with store display cell phones in a local Office Max. I mentioned that it might be possible to use working display phones and forward their phone calls to a long distance number that you frequenty dial. Well last weekend me and Evilcal tried it out and it works! We were in a Sprint PCS store and there were a few working cell phones there. So on one of the local phones I dialed *72, 1-435-234-8255 and we’ve suddenly got a local dialup for the PLA Voice Bridge. It’s been a week now and it’s still working!

The cool thing is that on my own Sprint PCS phone, I’ve got a service called PCS to PCS Dialing which means that I can call any other Sprint PCS phone any time of day or night and I don’t get charged for airtime. So this means I can call the voice bridge anytime I want and it’s free. The downside? Whoever pays for that Sprint PCS phone in that store gets charged 10 cents a minute whenever I’m on the voice bridge. So in a few months they’re probably going to come and kill me. I don’t know if my number will show up on their phone bill or not, but I’m betting it will. Luckily I think everyone on the bridge is lame so I don’t bother calling it that often.

So is this illegal to do? I personally don’t think it is. Evilcal thinks I’m wrong. I’ve been known to be wrong before and ended up in jail because of it so there’s a small possibility that Evilcal could be right. It seems like it wouldn’t be illegal though, because the Sprint PCS store put service on those phones for customers to come in and try out. There are no rules about what a customer can or cannot do with the phones. Not that I noticed anyway. They want the customers to use the phones. They wouldn’t have them sitting out on display with working service on them if they didn’t. So I’m not doing anything illegal really, am I? It’d be the same as if I went to their store from open to close and sat on the phone the entire time talking to my family 2,000 miles away. That’s definitely not illegal so why should call forwarding the line be any different? The way I see it, I’m not breaking the law, I’m just being an asshole.

But Evilcal sees it a little differently. To him it’s like when a retarded system administrator sets up a system with all kinds of important information on it but forgets to put a password on it. If you log into it and copy all the files, it’s illegal. It’s not legal just because the sysadmin is an idiot. Or if the owner of an ATM machine forgets to lock up the cash door on the machine. Just because it’s unlocked doesn’t mean you can open it up and take all the money home. Not legally anyway. So what do YOU think?