iWoz (17 page)

• o •

As it happened, most of my callers were young teenagers. Adults don't have the time or the patience to keep dialing a busy number over and over to get through.

But the kids, because they were dialing it over and over, frequently misdialed the number. One time, on a weekend, I took a live call from this woman who said, "Please, you've got to stop that machine. My husband works nights and he's got to sleep days, and we're getting a hundred calls a day that are meant for you." So the next day I called the phone company and had them change the number. I did that just for her.

I didn't hear any more complaints for the next month, so I assumed the phone number switch worked. But a manager at the phone company called me to tell me that a lot of other people were complaining.

And that was frustrating to me because I didn't want to make trouble for anyone. So I started thinking about getting an easy- to-dial number. I was in Cupertino where one of the prefixes was 255, so I thought, How about 255-5555? That would be easy to dial—you could keep dialing the same touch-tone, and your finger wouldn't have to leave the space. I tried calling this number, and I found out that no one had it. I also found out that nobody had 255-6666.

I called a manager at the phone company—Dial-a-Joke was such a big deal by now that even shy Steve Wozniak could talk to phone company managers. I suggested that the remedy for all the misdialing should be an easy-to-dial phone number. I asked first for the 255-5555 number, but they weren't allocating numbers in the 5000 range. So I said, "How about 255-6666?" He checked and said, "Fine." And he gave it to me.

I ended up getting some cards printed up that said: "The Crazy Polack. Heard a good one lately? Call 255-6666."

I figured that would be the end of the misdialing problems, but it wasn't. I remember coming home from Hewlett-Packard to the apartments in Cupertino, where I lived, and there were three people waiting. They said they worked at Any Mountain, which was and still is a major ski supply shop in California. And their number was 255-6667, one digit different. They said they were getting so many crank calls and weird people and kids calling they were afraid to answer their own phone! I was kind of proud of the fact that my little operation was able to affect that big a business, but I really did want to change my number again to protect them. So I did that. I changed it to a 575 prefix—575-1625— but that 575 prefix was actually set up for high-volume calls like radio station contests and that kind of thing. And I had that number until the end of Dial-a-Joke a couple of years later.

But Dial-a-Joke was hurting for money. The cost of the answering machine alone was breaking me.

At one point I thought maybe I could get money from the callers to help pay for Dial-a-Joke. I added the message, "Please send money to P.O. Box 67 in Cupertino, California." In three months I received only $11. Only once did I get a whole dollar. Usually I'd get a nickel, dime, or quarter taped to a piece of paper.

• o •

The biggest problem with Dial-a-Joke, like I said, was the expense. Not only did renting the machine cost a lot of money, but I was constantly having to rent new machines from the phone company.

To give you an idea, in theaters, these machines lasted years. But with me, they were lasting, like, a month. So every month I'd have to call up the phone company and say, "You've got to come over here to fix your answering machine, it's no good."

And really I loved doing that because they were charging me so much to rent it, it seemed only right that I wouldn't have to be stuck with it once it broke down. I liked to see them lose money, too. So this guy would show up at 5 p.m., when I got home from work, with a whole new machine. I'd meet the guy, let him into the apartment, he'd install the machine, and that was that.

One month, when I got home that day after five when the repairman was supposed to be there, there was instead a note from him saying he'd been there at 2 p.m.

Two p.m.? I called up the phone company. "He's always supposed to come after five. You better have him come after five tomorrow." Well, the next day I got a note saying he'd been there at 3 p.m. So now I called the phone company almost livid—and that is really unusual for me—and I said something like: "You'd better tell him to be there at 5 p.m. this time." But then the next day, again, there was a note saying he'd been there at 2 p.m. What was going on? I had no idea.

But I had gone three days with a nonworking machine that I was paying for, and that was no joke to me.

Now, I decided to play the game a different way. I called them and this time just very politely asked them to get the guy there at five. I hooked up an illegal but working answering machine to my Dial-a-Joke phone and left a message in my Slavic voice that told all the kids the machine was broken because of the phone company, and if they liked Dial-a-Joke they better call 611 (the number for telephone repair) to complain. And I told them to have all their friends call, too.

The next day I was pretty much in meetings all day at Hewlett- Packard, but I got home at 4:45 p.m., just in time to disconnect the illegal answering machine before the telephone guy got there. Then I called 611 and said, "I have a complaint."

She said, "I know. Dial-a-Joke."

"How did you know?" I asked.

A Good Number Is Hard to Find

I told you about 255-6666. That was the first good phone number of my life. Many years later, I got the home number 996- 9999, which had six digits the same. That was a milestone for me. When I lived in Los Gatos, I got numbers like 353-3333 and 354-4444 and 356-6666 and 358-8888.

My main goal with phone numbers was to someday get a number with all seven digits the same. The way they divided phone numbers between San Jose and San Francisco, all of those numbers went to San Francisco. For example, 777-7777 was the
San Francisco Examiner.
But as the area codes started running out of phone numbers, they started duplicating the prefixes, allowing San Jose's area code to someday have numbers that started with 222, 333, 444, or whatever.

In the early days of cell phones, I had a scanner that would let you listen to people's cell phone calls. It would show me the phone numbers of callers. One day my friend Dan spotted a number in our 408 area code starting with 999. I immediately called the phone company to get 999-9999 for myself. Unfortunately, they couldn't pull that number out of a larger group of numbers someone else had reserved.

A few weeks later, Dan spotted a number starting with 888. This time I lucked out.

I got the numbers 888-8800, 888-8801, up to 888-8899. So by about 1992, I had achieved my lifetime goal of having the ultimate phone number.

I put the number 888-8888 on my own cell phone, but something went wrong. I would get a hundred calls a day with no one on the line, not once. Sometimes I would hear shuffling sounds in the background. I would yell, whistle, but I could never get anyone to speak to me.

Very often I would hear a tone being repeated over and over, and then it hit me. It was a baby, pressing the 8 button over and I did a calculation that concluded that perhaps one-third of the babies born in the San Jose 408 area code would eventually call my number. And basically this made my phone unusable.

I'll tell you about one last number. It was 221-1111. This number has a mathematical purity like no other. It's all binary numbers—magic computer numbers. Powers of two. But the real purity was how small the digits were, 1s and 2s. By the rules of allocating phone numbers in the United States, no other phone number could have only two 2s and the rest 1s. In that sense, it was the lowest number you could get.

It was also the shortest dialing distance for your finger to move on a rotary phone,

As with 888-8888, I got so many wrong phone numbers every day. One day I was booking a flight and noticed that Pan American Airlines had the number, 800-221-1111.

The next phone call I got, I heard someone start to hang up after I said hello. I shouted, "Are you calling Pan Am?" And a woman came on the line and said, "Yes." I asked her what she wanted and booked my first flight for a Pan Am passenger that day.

Over the next two weeks, I booked dozens of flights. I made up a game to see how crazy I could make prices and flight times and still have people book it. After a couple of weeks, I started feeling guilty. And vulnerable. I didn't want to get arrested. So for the next two years, I answered every phone call with, "Pan Am, International Desk. Greg speaking." My friends would have to yell, "Hey, Steve, it's me," when they called. I would trick people into booking the craziest things, but I would always tell them it was a prank and that I was not really Pan Am.

For example, I might tell them that their flight would leave San Jose at 3 a.m., so a lot of times they would be really relieved. I started booking callers on what I called the "Grasshopper Special." If they flew through our lesser-used airports, it would reduce their fare. I almost always told them to fly to Billings, Montana, down to Amarillo, Texas, then up to Moscow, Idaho, then to Lexington, Kentucky, and
then
to their destination. Boston. Hundreds of people took me up on this. Hundreds, maybe thousands, over the course of two years. Anyone who knows me saw me taking reservations constantly. I also booked Grasshopper flights to other countries, telling people they had to stop in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Singapore to get to Sydney. I told some callers they could fly "freight." But they had to wear warm clothing. I kept a straight face because everyone always went for the lower fare. At some point I started telling them it was cheaper to fly on propeller planes than jets. The first time I did this, I tried to book a guy on a thirty-hour flight to London. But he would have nothing to do with it. I did get a number of people to buy into a cheap twenty-hour flight from San Jose to New York City. The craziest one—and I still smile when I think about it—was the one I called the "Gambler's Special." I would tell them that the first leg of their flight had to go to Las Vegas. From there, they had to go to our counter at the airport. And if they rolled a "7," the next leg would be free.

"Every other call today has been for Dial-a-Joke” she said, sounding really frustrated. So I just got this big grin on my face. I felt like I had made the big time. And yes, the guy did show up that day at 5 p.m.—with his supervisor. I let the guy in to replace it, but left the supervisor out in the rain with a book to read called
I'm Sorry, the Monopoly You Have Reached Is Not in Service
, by K. Aubrey Stone. It's a really lousy book, actually, but I thought he deserved it.

Eventually I had to give up Dial-a-Joke because I couldn't keep it up on my tiny HP engineer's salary. Even though I loved it so, so much.

• o •

There is one major thing I haven't yet told you about Dial-a- Joke. It is how I met my first wife, Alice. She was a caller one day when I happened to be taking live calls. I heard a girl's voice, and I don't know why but I said: "I bet I can hang up faster than you!" And then I hung up. She called back, I started talking to her in a normal voice, and before long we were dating. She was really young, just nineteen at the time.

We met, and the more I talked to her, the more I liked her. And she was a girl. I had only kissed two girls up to that point, so even being able to talk to a girl was really rare.

Alice and I were married two years later. And our marriage lasted just a little longer than my career at Hewlett-Packard, which is funny in a sad way.

Because I thought both of those arrangements were going to last forever.

Chapter 9
Wild Projects

During those four years at HP, from the time I was twenty- two to twenty-six, I constantly built my own electronics projects on the side. And that's not even including Dial-a-Joke. Some of these were really amazing.

When 1 look back, I see that all these projects, plus the science projects I did as a kid and all the stuff my dad taught me, were actually threads of knowledge that converged in my design of the first and second Apple computers.

After Dial-a-Joke, I was still dating Alice, still living in my first apartment in Cupertino, still coming home every night to watch
Star Trek
on TV and work on my projects. And there was almost always some kind of a project to work on, because after a while, people at HP started talking about my design skills to their friends, and I started to get calls from them. Like, could I go down to some guy's house and design something electronic for him? Gadgets, stuff like that. I would always do it for no money— I'd say, Just fly me down to Los Angeles and I'll bring the design down and I'll get it working. I never charged any money for it because this was my thing in life—designing stuff—this is what I loved to do. As I said before, it was my passion.

My boss, Stan Mintz, once came to me with a project to do a home pinball game. These Mends of his wanted to build a little pin- ball game with rockers and buttons and flippers, just like the ones you use in arcades. So I basically designed something digital that could watch the system, track signals, display the score, sound buzzers and all that. But there was one very tricky circuit that confused Stan, and I remember him telling me, "No, that's wrong. It won't work." But I showed him why it would work. And it did.