PHONE LOSERS OF AMERICA: by Brad Carter SMASHWORDS EDITION * * * * * PUBLISHED BY: Big Beef Bueno Books on Smashwords Phone Losers of America: Copyright © 2010 by Big Beef Bueno Books Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work. Foreword by Rob Vincent “I'm amazed at the accomplishments of PLA. Reading or hearing about different entities and organizations getting exploited with a hilarious twist is my idea of the perfect read.” -beerfuck It was a late summer night, sometime in the mid 1990s. Dressed in dark clothes, backpack slung over my shoulder, I snuck out the window of my bedroom. From my back yard I headed across town to my favorite rooftop, the high one with easy access to a building's worth of telephone lines belonging to businesses which had closed and emptied for the day. There was a convenient fire escape reaching from the ground straight up to the roof, and no nosy neighbors anywhere within view. I reached the roof, hooked my cheap plastic phone up by starlight, and dialed a string of digits I knew by heart. The phone ringing soothed me until it ended in a clumsy analog clatter. A gruff voice I'd come to know well mumbled a sleepy, “Hello?” “Cactus?” I responded cheerily, in a voice the called party had grown to know equally well. Their resulting string of swear words was awesome. I'd first come across the Phone Losers of America in text files on BBSes a year or so earlier. In the mid '90s, the BBS scene was still desperately trying to be all cool and underground and exclusive. Countless text files which mostly looked and sounded alike, wrapped what actual information they had in an air of forced mystery, all “we are super-elite and we grace you with this meager info because we are so much smarter and cooler than you.” Smarter I could have believed. I was a total newbie and knew it, but I also knew I definitely wasn't cooler than very many people. I was the quiet, brooding, artsy, fat, nerdy kid with social anxieties in the back of the classroom who read 2600 and listened to Off the Hook. “Cool” was something that happened to other people, most of whom enjoyed kicking the crap out of me for being different, so why would my fellow nerds waste our time pretending otherwise in what was entirely our own world? That whole act struck me as really dull, stupid, and unconvincing. Every so often, though, I'd find a file with a sense of humor. Something that spoke my language. Instead of forcing an unconvincing Disney villain act, the author was obviously having some damned fun for a change, and his life seemed to be an endless quest to amuse himself and others. These were the files I'd save to disk, maybe print out to hard copy, and reread often. It didn't take me too long to recognize that most of these really cool files were from a ’zine called "Phone Losers of America." They actually labeled themselves "losers," celebrated it even! How great was that? To a loser like me, pretty freaking great! The writer, RedBoxChiliPepper, didn't just focus on phreak and hacker tricks. The PLA zine was a jolly mix of jokes, pranks, insane adventures, endless non-sequiturs involving some guy named Roy and a certain breed of thorny desert plant, and guides to the exact sorts of irresponsible hobbies I'd taken up to preserve what passed for my boyhood sanity. RBCP celebrated the angry and absurd right alongside my own twisted sense of humor, and taught stupid tech tricks while he was at it. By day I might have been too much of a loser to stop the "cool" kids from making my life hell, but by night I was just enough of a loser to make sure their phones kept mysteriously ringing nonstop, their mailbox was overstuffed with magazine subscriptions, or their cable bill was loaded with expensive pornography for their troubles. When you're a miserable kid who feels like nothing makes sense and the entire world is against you, your first instinct is usually to lash out and break some shit in retaliation. Using my growing skill set to accomplish the petty acts of destructive revenge every oppressed teenager dreams about, I was able to have the last laugh in my own aching head. It was more than that, though... lying on that rooftop, looking up at the stars, with endless possibilities at my fingertips as my nerdy skills, explorations, and pursuits became things I could actually make work for me, I felt like I was finally part of a world which could be a fun and entertaining place, and in which my taking part made some damn sense. Eventually, I grew up a little. School ended, I became prosecutable as an adult and a lot less willing to pursue a life of petty crime. Without my former peers to worry about, I had a chance to finally live life on my own terms and develop my own opinions of what was "cool." For example, I rediscovered how fascinating the tech and telecom worlds were in their own right, when I wasn't just focusing on what I could use from them toward irresponsible ends. No longer out to make a pain in the ass or a criminal of myself, I realized I'd always be a hacker. Fast-forward 15 years or so. Things have certainly changed around here. Through growing up with the PLA I built up the courage to get out of the damn house and start attending 2600 meetings. Finding crowds in which I truly belonged led me to finally figure out how to deal with other people, a skill which I hadn't had cause or ability to develop before. Taking an active role in hacker culture and meeting like-minded geeks has led to my greatest friendships, as well as my involvement with hacker conferences and Off the Hook. Helping newbies find their niche in the ever-evolving hacker community has become one of the driving forces in my life. Against everything I ever expected, my creative pursuits have actual audiences! I'm living the sort of life I've always wanted to, surrounded by a far better crowd of wonderful people than I ever could have asked for. My world is still an amazingly fun place, and I don't see how any of this would have happened were it not for what those crazy text files and their nerdy shits and giggles did for me half my lifetime ago. These are the tales you now find yourself holding in the form of a book by my brilliant friend Brad Carter, RBCP himself. Nowadays, those expensive phone calls I was going to such risk and trouble to steal range from dirt-cheap to free. I've matured into something like a reasonably responsible adult, far more interested in learning, teaching, and getting a laugh than randomly breaking stuff. But if sometime today, tomorrow, or far into the mysterious future you find yourself with access to a certain stream of telecommunications data, don't be too surprised if it decodes to a voice not unlike my own, still cheerfully asking some unsuspecting human the eternal question... "Cactus?" Rob T Firefly Rob Vincent New York, USA, September 2010 Leaving “One Saturday morning I started browsing the PLA forums on my laptop. Within two minutes, I was connected to the speakerphone inside an elevator in a Las Vegas casino, yelling at the occupants to stop farting in the elevator... all the way from Australia. If that's not cool, then I don't know what is! Thanks PLA!” -Tim My life abruptly changed the night I let my best friend die in a gruesome phone phreaking accident. The accident wasn’t exactly my fault, but I kind of assumed that the whole thing would be blamed on me since I was there and did nothing about it. So I panicked and I ran away. Looking back, I realize I could have handled it differently, but this is what I did instead. It began in the Spring of 1990 in Edwardsville, Illinois. It was around 3 o’clock in the morning and I sat upon a hill in a stranger's back yard, overlooking the back of the phone company building. My job was to keep a lookout as my partner in crime, Doug, rummaged around in a dumpster next to the building. We were behind the Illinois Bell building where they parked all the phone company vans and stored a few old broken phone booths. It wasn't a fenced-in area but it should have been. It's a wonder that any phone company would leave their dumpster wide open like they did. Phone phreaks had been using the “trash” found in dumpsters for decades to acquire confidential information from the phone companies, yet very few bother locking their dumpsters even today. Sometimes we would both climb into the dumpster, grab a few bags and throw them in my car.