When we were young in a small rural town outside the US, we would borrow copies of Windows 95 or 98 from the school. In order to get them activated, rather than

When we were young in a small rural town outside the US, we would borrow copies of Windows 95 or 98 from the school. In order to get them activated, rather than a keygen or other kind of crack we figured out that we could call the Microsoft help hotline from a payphone and tell them our key simply wasn't working. We would give them a plausible sounding fake key then they would give us a new real key. Nothing seemed to get verified or cross checked but it worked at least 4 or 5 times for our little gang of proto-nerds.