Shut your damn phone off before you start screwing around.

I've gotten "purse search" calls from escorts, believe it or not.

(Nothing too racy though)

but most of us remember the 80's, even those of us up to our necks in booze, blow and hookers.

Next time you tell this story try using a different decade, nice try though.

I still remember my first cell phone, it cost four grand and had a battery that weighed about twenty pounds, but I was one of only a few thousand people in the country that had a car phone back in 1984

Before that I had been making hobby calls from my homephone, my desk at work, payphones in the hotel lobbies (most agencies had 800# call-ins), and sharing a cellphone my wife had bought.  

Wow, how things have changed since then!

behind Chicago and DC/Baltimore.

Four grand was a lot to pay for a "car phone" but I was involved in the lottery to award the non wireline licenses so it was a necessary expense.

Used to do business with a guy who was putting his wife through med school. Neither was young, second marriage for both. They made a deal - he would work and put her through school, and when she was practicing, it would be his turn to take some time off.

Everything went perfectly and the day came when he retired. This was the 80s, so apparently with his new time and money he decided to indulge in blow and hookers. He was having a grand time until one night, in the midst of a binge with a couple of ladies and a pile of white powder, he butt dialed his wife. She apparently listened for a while and despite it being sort of wild, got the general idea. We know this because by the time he got home the locks had been changed and all his stuff was on the lawn of their mini-mansion. After some shouted and heated discussion, he retired to a nearby hotel planning to beg for forgiveness.

But she was not done. She called the cops, looking to get him arrested for drugs (hell hath no fury, indeed). This did not happen as there was apparently nothing to be found. But she also gave them permission to search his computer, hoping to find something else to punish him for. Youngsters may not remember it, but this was the dawn of the child abuse witch hunt era, with people being prosecuted for reconstructed memories and all sorts of craziness with no real evidence. He had some naughty pictures on his computer and the small town police decided they were kiddie porn. So they prosecuted and persecuted him for that.

I know that much is true, because a fair amount of it is still available in online legal filings. The rest of what I heard is this:

She took him back after a while, and even helped him mount his legal defense. She was sorry, sort of, and forgave him, also sort of. But things were definitely never the same. The pictures were not kiddie porn, either, but it took a couple of years and a lot of time and money to prove that. I think they were your normal, Barely Legal teen porn, but the local Barneys were not eager to make that connection for him. The marriage ended with a sigh, he moved back to the western state that he came from, and started working again (poor, but wise?). Pretty much started over, intentionally losing contact with most people he had known. The tight-assed, Midwestern state where they had lived (not the same as mine) having lost its charm.

No moral to this story, just fucking sad but true. And with a little bad luck, it probably could be any of us.

zig

Those phones back then were frickin' huge.

maybe some grainy images on his stack of 5 1/4 " floppy discs.

Not only that, there were barely any personal computers back then and no Internet at all.  
Even by the late '80s the fastest PC was a 246 processor, which could barely display pictures at all,  and they had to be sent over a phone modem.

And all the younguns want to kick us off!

I remember the phones you are talking about.  The picture of the "brick" I linked above was actually the "modern" phones when they started to get "small."
I never could afford them but I had a friend who had a car phone and a "portable" phone for his business. The car phone was hard wired to the car battery with a big unit, and a seperate antenna on the outside, and a corded handset inside the car. The "portable" phone came with a shoulder harness, because you had to lug around the 20 pound battery and the 5 pound phone that was attached to it

-- Modified on 10/14/2011 12:36:57 PM

shouild have said, "he meant phony story"

part of it got cut off.

-- Modified on 10/14/2011 1:52:00 PM

-- Modified on 10/14/2011 4:59:27 PM

Did he butt-dial his wife on his Iphone? That *is fucking sad*.

I guess the devil really is in the details…lol…

Make it late 90s. It all runs together sometimes.

zig