Phone funny.

My parents had the most random issue with their landline last week. We(they)'ve had the same phone number since I've learned to write numbers. We moved to town in 1984(keeping the same #), and haven't changed anything since. The other day the phone started ringing . . . for a guy in the town just over the Minnesota border. I called to chit chat with the Mom, and the phone started humming with a dial tone! It then proceeded to the "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is incorrect. Please hang up and dial again." Followed by that really annoying Enh Enh Enh Enh Enh that is designed to warn you from across the house that you've left the phone off the hook. It could wake you from a sound sleep from 2 states away, and I'm trying to have a conversation with my mom! I called back and it did the same thing. They'd apparently been getting phone calls for the guy named Randy for a couple of days. He was getting pissed at them because he was trying to have a conference call. They could apparently have conversations with the guy. Random. It was like one of those old school party lines. You had to wait for the phone to be free and all that fun stuff. (Not that I was alive during this, or maybe I was, but I don't think I was old enough to use the phone! Although when I was almost a teen all we had to do was dial the last 5 numbers of a 7 digit number from our town to be connected. Instead of 555-0011, it was 50011. Small towns!)

The phone is fixed. For those who know my family- the joke was that it was a wiretap gone bad. Somebody botched the job! That's funny. Like the funny-because-it's-probably-true-funny.