This reminds me of a prank I pulled on a friend back when I was in college. I had just discovered ip-relay.com which did Type to Speech with a real human being that would say everything you typed to whomever you had them call, and then they would type back the other person’s response to you. The funny thing was the person answering the call had to say “go ahead” after everything they said in order for the agent to type back to me so it was a little ridiculous to use for pranking.

Anyway I told him I was with Microsoft’s legal team and we had been monitoring his piracy for years and we had someone on the way to his house to confiscate his computer. The agent I had doing the call must have been into helping me pull this off because they went above and beyond to tell me what background sounds they heard and what they could make out when he started whispering to his mom.

I was rolling on the floor and my dormmate got curious and wanted to know what I was doing. When he read through the conversation he busted out laughing too and started helping me figure out what to say next.

By the end of our conversation we had told his mom that we had agents on a flight – out to his tiny little town out in the middle of nowhere, which doesn’t even have an airport – and that no one was to leave the premises until the agents arrived,nor should they even think about touching the computer. They agreed not to go anywhere or do anything with the computer.

Then his mom got the brilliant idea to say “wait, how do we know this isn’t a prank?” At this point I wondered if they had just been playing along and I was the fool, but I froze up, not knowing how to respond. My dormmate pushed me out of the way and typed “Ma’am, I don’t believe I have laughed once, go ahead.” and the response back from her was “I’m sorry, we’ll wait for the agents to arrive, go ahead.”

We laughed our fool heads off about this for days, not knowing fully whether or not it was a great prank or if they were actually messing with us.

I found out about a week later from another friend in the same town that while we were on the phone with his mom, my friend had ripped the harddrive out of his computer and threw it into the creek behind his house.

Then that same night they went out to WalMart and bought a new hard drive and Windows XP and he put it in and installed the legit OS.

I couldn’t believe it. I honestly didn’t think they actually bought it not least because of the whole “go ahead” thing, but they did, and then I felt bad so I never told him it was me.