Hi, it's not Brett

Now that phone call sources are so readily identified we don't see a lot of obscene phone callers anymore. For a long while, though, they were common: Breathers, guys who talked dirty, guys with elaborate routines to pull a girl into a conversation that ended up in some obscene alleyway. The obscene caller has always been of interest not because of what he does but rather what he did before the invention of the phone. Whatever the thrill is in what he does, it is unlikely that it was quite the same with obscene shouting or obscene notes or obscene smoke signals. Certainly graffiti does not seem to fit the bill. What outlet did the perverse phone caller use before the phone?

Or is he new? Is his perversion created by the phone's availability rather than tapped in a more modern way? Indeed CD's, TV, movies and the like all seem to be logical extensions of preelectronic passive pornography but how do phone perversions fit in? And once opened, what happens when caller id closes this outlet? Does technology create and destroy behavior among us? Once opened, does it move on to new areas when closed? Konrad Lorenz thought that the ability to kill among mammalian species was naturally inhibited by the proximity of the combatants but when man developed the technology to kill at long range he became much more abstract and dangerous a killer. Does technology however seemingly innocuous, carry these great risks?

More specifically, Brett, what the hell were you thinking?