Back in the day, Steve Wozniak had a telephone number that matched the Pan Am reservation number. People in Silicon Valley’s 408 area code who failed to dial 800 would get him instead. Wozniak's longtime goal was to acquire a number with 7 matching digits. To his disappointment, there were no Silicon Valley exchanges with 3 matching digits, so he had to be satisfied with numbers like 221-1111. Then one day, he heard about a new exchange: 888. After much waiting, he finally had it: 888-8888. That was his new cellphone number, and his greatest numerical triumph. Unfortunately, the number proved unusable. He received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line — just dead air, sometimes the sound of a television in the background, or a little gurgling. Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Wozniak heard a woman say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver was snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies! They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset — again and again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep." The children of America were making their first prank call, and the person who answered the phone was none other than Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.
