The life behind Powwownow

Unlike, say, a turnip, the telephone isn’t an inherently hilarious inanimate object. It takes two people to make it funny. Usually it takes a lot of yelling. Occasionally, just leaving a message can be funny, so long as you humiliate yourself in the worst way possible.

At least, that’s the conclusion we came to after hours of exhaustive research:

Flight of the Concords

Most of the time if you’re obsessed with your mate’s girlfriend, you keep quiet, pine, and write in your diary, right? But wouldn’t life be more fun if you spent all your energy actively trying to sabotage their relationship? You might run out of friends, but you could get sexy-lucky.

Falling Down

Falling Down should be required viewing for the under-10s. That way, we might be able to breed out that race of line-cutting, queue-jumping, last-sandwich taking sub-humans that make life that extra bit unbearable.

Anchorman

What would you do if a burly biker drop-kicked your bestest friend in the whole wide world off a bridge? That’s right – you’d place a collect call, start crying, and never stop.

Jerry Maguire

Thankfully I was too young in the 1990s when pop-culture chewed up and excreted this idiot phrase into the mouths of every American politician, car salesman and debt collector. My parents tell me it was a pretty rough year.

Swingers

Rule #47 of hooking up: never, ever leave a message for a potential love interest. Studies show you have a 98% chance of scaring them, and a 2% chance of causing them to call the Federales.

Seinfeld

Seinfeld’s George Costanza might not be a great role model, but does do a neat trade in schemes, plots and general weaselry. Here, George is dodging his girlfriend as he knows she’s about to break up with him, yet he wants to show her off at a work do before she does. Actually, I take it back – he’s a great role model.

Mean Girls

I must have watched Mean Girls about ten times. Not because I overly enjoy it, but because my girlfriend uses sex as a weapon and forces me to do things against my will. But like any kind of torture, after a while you start to enjoy it. Now I find this scene hilarious, rather than it making me want to grind my ears off with a lathe.

Boiler Room

I had a telesales job for a while, and I had a little photo of Vin Diesel from Boiler Room in my booth to encourage me. Then I got fired, and they kept my Vin Diesel photo.

Green Wing (NSFW)

You’ve been there: your partner breaks up with you and you call their work phone pretending to have accidently dialled them while making mad love to a new fictional conquest. Hey, we’ve all done it, right? Right?

Fonejacker

Less a prank call and more a testament to how long the British will quietly cope with mounting absurdity with their characteristic rigid Labium superius and their own ejaculations of dry wit. If this call had happened in the USA, somebody would have died.

Every technology has its unintended consequence. Like how early pest-sprays evolved into Zyklon B, or how the invention of the television eventually led to the horrors of The Hills.

And what about the conference call? No longer is it simply the domain of beet-faced businessmen on the verge of a massive suicide. No, with a bit of ingenuity, you can leverage the technology for all manner of amusing pastimes. These are they:

1) Roleplaying Games

Role-players are a solution-orientated flavour of nerd. So it was only a matter of time after the advent of video conferencing that dungeon masters worldwide would figure out they could use the tech to commune over vast distances and hold campaigns as if they were in the same room – the perfect solution if your party’s elven priest suddenly up and moves to New York.

2) Stress relief

The great thing about the telephone is that the individual on the other end can’t see what you’re doing, whether it’s lounging around in a leather diaper, or grooming your rats with a tiny little comb. Or, like American comedian Demetri Martin in the clip above, blowing off some steam and expressing your distaste for an idiotic client physically.

3) Read to your children

Are you a heartless travelling businessman, who through a tangled web of sexual dalliances has left young families dotted all over the country? Well, earn what little paternal kudos you can in the most efficient way possible by setting up bedtime story conference calls for your franchise of kids. Even better, you can put your sprogs on mute, so they never need even find out about each other!

4) Make music miles away

It’s not unusual these days for some bands, typically separated by distance (Postal Service) or bound together by contract but can’t stand to be in the same room as each other (Stone Temple Pilots), to use video conferencing to record music together. Or in the case of leathery punk legend Iggy Pop and the seven competition winners in the clip above, perform live together.

5) Hold a murder mystery

If you think that holding a murder mystery over conference call would take a great deal of finesse, you’d be right. But that doesn’t mean that intrepid murder mystery game companies haven’t been doing it for years, while alternate reality games (multimedia games that take place in the real world, usually involving conspiracy theories) have been growing increasingly sophisticated, even setting up conference calls between players, actors and actors pretending to be players.

6) Learn something

Without web conferencing, distance learning would be stuck in the Stone Age. Nowadays, students worldwide think nothing of IMing their friends during online lectures, or dialling into conference call seminars and promptly falling asleep. In 2006, it was even found that 3.2 million students were taking at least one online lecture a semester.

7) Gamble away your savings

Gamble over conference call? Why not? From playing poker over video conference to, as in the above clip, placing wagers on which of four taxi firms stays on the line when being patched though to a conference call, the possibilities for making a bit of illicit dough over the phone are endless.

8) Hold a secret political rally

Do you hold unacceptable political views that cannot possibly be aired in public, like thinking all buskers should be executed or believing in government-mandated nudity? Then the conference call is the perfect port for you and people who share your unpalatable politics to meet and plot your revolution.

9) Finally talk to your family

Did some traumatic experience in your childhood cause your family to splinter and scatter into the four winds, moving around the world to that perfect distance that’s far enough away to eliminate frequent visits? Well, the conference call gives the illusion of familial togetherness, with none of the awkward physical contact, long silences or boozy fistfights. And you can always hang up.

10) Haunt a conference call

People are idiots. If you happen to trawl the internet for conference calls, you’ll soon find many people advertising conference calls you call join – often providing both their telephone number and access number so you can call up and haunt them. Be it a meeting of masseuses from Michigan, or a prayer group from the Philippines – the potential for japery is endless. Or why not find a way to join one of your boss’s conference calls and see what he really thinks of you? Not that we could possibly endorse such behaviour, of course.

Spurious lawsuits are just the best, aren’t they? Particularly when they get picked up by the news and cause the plaintiff further embarrassment than the actual cause of the suit – like that one where a lawyer sued his ex-wife for giving him herpes.

So it’s with a huge dollop of delicious schadenfreude we enjoyed the story this week that 30-something Toronto harlot Gabriella Nagy is suing telecoms behemoth Rogers Communications for $600,000 after her husband discovered that she’d made a string of mega-long phone calls to an unknown number. The husband called the number, and the gentleman on the other end confirmed all manner of sexy shenanigans with the husband’s wife. The husband then walked out on the wife and their two kids.
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Hold music. Elevator music. Muzak. Whatever you call it, you’ve heard it – whether it be mawkish new age, sleazy sax solos or bloodless cover versions of Tears for Fears singles played by jobbing musicians just trying to feed their kids.

The company behind the phenomenon is Muzak, and they’ve got their tendrils in everything – the music you hear while you’re on hold, the music you hear in the changing room in Gap, even those interminable shopping centre Christmas playlists. Yup, thanks to the vagaries of copyright law stopping people from simply having a radio on, chances are you’re probably listening to a Muzak product.

Ever wonder where it comes from? Why it’s there? We’ve got 18 facts for you. Oh, and why not start up the below playlist to hear some of our favourite hold music songs as you read?
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