In Continuum.

Numbers in Liquid Paper

Just in case you guys don't already know about his existence, there is a man named Luke Johnson on youtube's front page right now, with his own featured video about this phone experiment that he is doing. Basically, he recently got himself a new cellphone and a new line just so that people around the world can call him through that number. Of course, at the end of the video he did post his own number on the screen, and the basis of the experiment is to basically find how just how many people around the world would call a number that belongs to a total and absolute stranger. As a sucker for this sort of experiments, I called and before I tell you what happened, here's a little something I gathering over the years, about phone numbers of strangers.

The one and only - legal - source of strangers' phone numbers is from the Yellow Pages, the thick yellow book with the logo that kinda looks like Playboy's, just upside down. But anyway, I used to sit on the table in my father's office and flip through those Yellow Pages and look for my friends, or even just a random stranger and check out where they live and what their names are. Prank calls weren't something I did though, think I only tried that once in my life. I never called any of the numbers my fingers fell upon, but I guess it was the ease at contacting a total stranger that interested me.

The illegal source of phone numbers is of course from the backseats of buses in liquid paper. Especially on the last two rows of any buses nowadays, it is not uncommon to find a phone number or two scribbled in untidy handwriting, of a girl desperate and horny for sex, advertised with the simple words "Free Sex! Just ask for Kelly!" or something like that. Most of the time, logic tells you that if a person wants to have sex, he or she probably is going to go to a club to get those, and not exactly sneak behind the back of the bus and the scribble his or her own phone number there, right? Sure, we can be sexually desperate but that doesn't mean you have to be stupid at the same time.

Krishna, Samuel and I used to head to Kallang Shopping Centre to play pool after school almost once every week because the rates there are cheap. Now, this shopping centre isn't really a shopping centre, but it looks more like a giant warehouse or some relic of the past, something out of the pages of a history textbook, left over from the past only because nobody likes it. Sure it had very good chicken rice in the hawker centre in the basement, but everything else about that shopping centre was just rather pathetic. I remember while squatting in the toilet one day, I noticed the extensive amount of graffiti as I scrutinized every inch of the door. Anything from free sex to any forms of sex was up there, but most of them were angst filled message from a certain school boy to another. Very childish stuff, and it was more amusing than it was disturbing that such stuff are happening in our society. If not for anything else, at least it made the trip to the God-awful toilet a lot more interesting.

But just when you think everybody has the common sense to know that most of those vandalisms are fake, people actually DO call those numbers scribbled by liquid papers at the back of public buses or on public toilet doors. I have a friend who was the victim of that, because her phone number somehow ended up on the toilet door of a petrol station in Ang Mo Kio. For a period of time she started receiving phone calls asking her for sex and stuff like that, until one day she questioned one of the perverts where he got the phone number from, and he told her that he saw it on the toilet door in some random petrol station. The calls kept coming for a month or something until she couldn't take it anymore but to cut that line, though I told her that she could have just scrapped that number off the toilet door or something. But oh well, whoever that did it might have scribbled that number somewhere else anyway, so I guess it was best to cut the line.

So there Luke, that incident alone proved that humans have this insatiable fetish when it comes to phone numbers that belong to the strangers. And since the number of calls you received have sky-rocketed to over 21000 the last time I checked, I guess your experiment worked in a way, though I am not entirely sure about the purpose behind it. It is a cool concept sure, but I still wonder what you are trying to accomplish, especially with the video now featured on the front page, you are going to get a lot more calls from the rest of the world. Let's just hope that your wife doesn't file a divorce after this, or smash the phone in your face or something. That gay man from UK isn't going to be pleased.

I dialed his phone number all the way from here, and apparently he was in a call with another caller at that time. But then again, it might just be possible that he bailed out of his own experiment and got sick and tired of it. Whatever the reason is, it is still a good way to gain fame and perhaps even fortune. So if you guys have nothing at all to do nowadays - like me - do give this Luke Johnson a call and help him out with the experiment. It is interesting, and he is nice to talk to. Just talk about anything, he will kindly reply even if it is 4am in the morning, really.



P.S. Press 001 then +1 before dialing the number displayed.