Back in the mid-2000s I was really into computer security (still am) and managed to trick my school's truancy system using something called a silent termination

Back in the mid-2000s I was really into computer security (still am) and managed to trick my school's truancy system using something called a silent termination test line. Basically what this does is cuts out the line entirely to test for line noise for a few minutes, like you pick up the phone and it'll still be connected to that number, no dial tone just silence. I just confidently went right up to the secretary and told her my new home phone number was the silent termination test line. There would be this automated truancy bot calling everyone but whenever it would reach my name, skipping around a class a day at one point (Still don't know how I actually graduated other than the teachers liking me and getting my homework done anyways), it would just fuck the entire system up and a bunch of people wouldn't get calls after me either. Smoking drugs and hanging out with girls was way funner, completely zero regrets getting doing stuff like that out of my system early... considering the trajectory my life has been on I really didn't need post secondary. Can only imagine how stressful and expensive that would have been and to what depressing, indebted end. There was a bunch of other fun stuff on that test prefix, but half of that is lost to the sands of time, the funnest I don't even know what the hell it was. I've asked random phone company linemen about it and they're basically just like "how the hell do you even know anything about this?", and can't tell me what this number I found was. I basically war-dialed it based on patterns from other numbers on the prefix and it'd give me 30 seconds and then a real dial tone (payphones around then actually used some recorded tone). Since I could call these numbers for free from the school payphone, it was easy to find, and that real dial tone was probably in the phone company HQ. We found this enormous list of interesting phone numbers from phonelosers.org (Wish those were archived!) and just started doing shit like calling the white house and the president of kenya's office. I think we only stopped after a friend of mine made a huge stupid mistake and tried to print the list out. The library printer just started spitting out REAMS of paper, the librarian was like what the hell and I just remember thinking damn he fucked up, and running away hahaha