When I was in High School...

[LaserWolf]

... I was in the special class.
We had our own suite of rooms. We got English and history credits for hanging out on the sofa, goofing around, reading books, keeping a journal and writing papers.
There were about 30 of us ducking in and out of the suite all day, occasional meeting with our teachers or a seminar.
For other credits we had to go to "real" classes.
Can't remember much about those, but I guess I passed just enough to graduate.
But mostly I was across the street, or in the parking lot, or the cafeteria selling pot.
What you kids call trees.
In those days pot came from Mexico and if you took 3-5 bong hits you could get a nice buzz that made the next 3-5 more pleasant.
I remember I had to take algebra twice to pass.
But I could convert pounds; to dollars to kilo to ounces to grams, in any combination you wanted in my head accurately and quickly. Don't ask me to do that today.
But that is not what I am here to talk about.
I want to talk about Ticketmaster.
A kid walks up to me and says a friend of his is working at the Ticketmaster office at Montgomery Mall.
And he can get BLANK TICKETS! All you need to do is fill in the artist/venue/date/section/seat.
I don't remember the financial arrangement.
I don't remember selling them.
I know I didn't fill in the blanks and sell counterfeit tickets.
I do remember me and my friends filling them in and going to shows.
I remember if the show was general admission the ticket taker likely wouldn't even look at the ticket.
(Other people would buy the cheapest ticket Ticketmaster had [puppet show at the Smithsonian] and use that.
Then one day about six of us went in 2 groups to the Kennedy Center.
I think we wanted to see Taj Mahal.
The usher snatched up the group I was with. They were waiting for us.
"We bought it from a guy out front, we didn't know they were fakes." They let us go.
My other friends swore they bought it from Ticketmaster and demanded to be let in or their money back.
They were eventually let go too.
The kid I was getting blanks from got fired.
That ended the great Ticketmaster scam.

I would love to tell you it ended my gate crashing, but no.

 

[HarveyCanal]

For a week or so while I was in high school, I worked in a call center for carpet cleaners. They'd give us each a page from the phone book and have us cold call everyone. I hated this job and didn't give 2 shits about it. But I had friends who worked there and I needed some money, so there I was. This was the mid-80's when there was still no caller ID nor *69 which allowed someone to automatically dial the last number that called your phone. And answering machines were new. So when I would call and get an answering machine, rather than say I was from a carpet cleaning company, I'd say:





Hello Mr. Jones. This is Steve A___ (a friend of mine who didn't work at the carpet cleaners) and it's come time for me to inform you that I've been the one who has been sleeping with Mrs. Jones. I really think she loves me instead of you, so it's time for us to have a man to man talk about where this is going. You can reach me at 713-___-____.





And yes, I'd provide Steve's real number. Most I left the message with evidently knew it was a hoax. But sure enough, I got one dude to bite. I found out about it the next morning when Steve came to school shook as a ghost. He had no clue that I was the one who had set him up, but sure enough he told me all about some irate grown man calling him up and cussing him, then his mother out on the phone. The guy then said he was going to come after Steve once he figured out where Steve lived.





And no, I never told Steve who set him up. Poor dude.

 

[jjfad027]

We knew a dude at Kinkos who could make fake tickets to any show at Maritime Hall in SF (around '97-'99) I saw a dude at a Roots show get elbowed in the face for trying to get in on someone else's blunt session. Good times

 

[JectWon]

LaserWolf said:


A kid walks up to me and says a friend of his is working at the Ticketmaster office at Montgomery Mall.







Montgomery Mall...that one was nice. I typically frequented the Lake Forest Mall. If I wanted to go out to Montgomery Mall, it was a few too many ride-on bus transfers (took forever).





High School Scams:





> Skip school, take Ride-On to the Shady Grove Metro station, red-line it to DC and buy a bunch of fake oakley shades (foakleys) from a few street vendors...take foakleys and sell them to dumb highschool kids who thought the cheap plastic pieces of shit were real for $30 bucks a pop (got em' for $10)





> Circa pay-phone era...I would always keep about 2 bucks in quarters on me...some of the 'fancier' pay-phones would have the call waiting feature...you could call a friend, and (while the phone is ringing) hang-up the phone for the perfect amount of time which would return the quarters (thinking you were ending the call) and then pick the phone back up (triggering the call-waiting feature), then just do it again and your friend would be waiting on the other line...essentially the sync between call watiing and returning your change was off and you could make free calls





> Early internet era...we would buy alcohol...online. It was the wild west.