Quote:
Originally Posted by kane
I had a friend that ran that on his BBS. To this day we give him shit about it because we grew up in a small town out in the middle of nowhere. He would use computer to connect to other BBS sites to get new software and updates and all kinds of stuff. We loved it and played Trade Wars daily, but a month after he started this he got the phone bill and it was $640 because every call outside of our little town was long distance. He just about shit himself and his parents were not very happy.
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When I first discovered modems and BBSes, I lived in a small suburb of Philly and there weren't really any local BBSes then. More importantly to this story, there weren't any local AOL numbers. Instead, you had to call the Philly number which was long distance. Well, the AOL free 20 hours or whatever it was then disk had arrived and I was off school early due to finals week. I decided to try it and I pretty much did all 20 hours in two afternoons connected long distance the whole time.
When the phone bill came in an envelope three times as thick as usual, my mother went into banshee mode. The cost was in the many hundreds. Though, I will say that I think I know where I get my hustle from because she called the phone company and essentially told them her daughter was an idiot without the mental capacity to understand long distance numbers. I think they halved the bill or something.
Given enough time, she will still bring that up on every visit home.