Nine in the morning. Eight at night. Two a.m. There would be no peace for Mr McKenny until he admitted borrowing that shovel from a boy half his age and half a world away.
Sometimes Anthrax pranked closer to home. The Trading Post, a weekly rag of personals from people selling and buying, served as a good place to begin. Always the innocent start, to lure them in.
`Yes, sir, I see you advertised that you wanted to buy a bathtub.'
Anthrax put on his serious voice. `I have a bathtub for sale.'
`Yeah? What sort? Do you have the measurements, and the model number?'
And people thought phreakers were weird.
`Ah, no model number. But its about a metre and a half long, has feet, in the shape of claws. It's older style, off-white. There's only one problem.' Anthrax paused, savouring the moment.
`Oh? What's that?'
`There's a body in it.'
Like dropping a boulder in a peaceful pond.
The list on System X had dial-up modem numbers, along with usernames and password pairs for each address. These usernames were not words like `jsmith' or `jdoe', and the passwords would not have appeared in any dictionary. 12[AZ63. K5M82L. The type of passwords and usernames only a computer would remember.
This, of course, made sense, since a computer picked them out in the first place. It generated them randomly. The list wasn't particularly user-friendly. It didn't have headers, outlining what each item related to. This made sense too. The list wasn't meant to be read by humans.