I used to have one of those answering machines.. before the days of voicemail being standard, these machines would answer your land line and play an outgoing message from a tape... then record the message on another tape for you listen to later. (Tapes were analog storage media.. like when people used to store their media instead of just steaming it.. they would actually buy and keep it.. on tapes... like savages.
Anyway, I had accidentally called a wrong number.. cause you had to dial an actual number.. not like just saying "call mom" or whatever... you needed to memorize the whole thing and dial it... oh, phones had dials on them.. dialing a number meant actually turning a wheel to the number you wanted... 7 times.
Shit, this story is getting long... I know what they mean when they say its impossible to talk to your kids... anyway...
So.. back in the day, when you called a wrong number (there were phone numbers back then that no one had... like unusued numbers), a recording would play stating the error, sometimes saying (boo-boo-beep) "The number you have reached, 800-555-2-Thousand, has been changed. The new number is 800-555-3001"... or whatever. Oh ya.. people changed phone numbers every time they moved back then... so changing phone numbers happened all the time.
The recording gave me an idea. I used a tape recorder (see above) to record the messages I get when randomly calling phone numbers (if it rang instead of erroring, I just hung up). I recorded dozens of those "Boo-Boo-Beep" messages. I then edited them together and recorded it as my outgoing message on my answering machine tape. It went like this:
(Boo-Boo-Beep) "The number you have dialed, [my phone number] has been changed. The new number is 303-555-1612,586,382,999...99. 853,666....hundred".
It was about 5 days before my father got me at home and told me, "son, somethings terribly wrong with your phone".