I overslept today, and as I stumbled into the office without having touched my coffee yet I see my skype bouncing "Incoming call - Frank Garrett". I scrambled for my headphones and answer the call. Why do I answer calls from strangers? Well, I don't, Adland.tv does, I wait for people to state what they want since I've gotten plenty of really strange calls. "Hey, how are you?" says a voice and I act cagey because, well, I have no idea who this is and the conversation is a bunch of choppy little pleasantries back and fourth, when I don't respond, there's long silences. "I can't understand ya", says the man and I correct my position, asking if he can hear better, to which he responds something else. A moment later, there it is again "I can't understand ya" with the same exact intonation, and at that instant I hang up, block the caller and tweet fantastic, I was just skyped by a bot. I might be over-stating the bot bit, as the recording could have been controlled by a human, but if it was a bot then that would almost be impressive.

Now, fully awake, I go on a hunt to see what this Frank Garret phenomenon is. (For the record, his skype name was either duncanconstruction2 or duncan_construction1 - there's dozens of Frank's and Duncan's on skype). Turns out it's some poor guy who has been crank called, and now the recording of his voice is being used to crank call others, a.k.a soundboard pranks. In jackulator forums a thread talks about how the real Frank has filed a police report, and how there have people trying to file reports on him. Yikes.

I guess all I have to do now is kick back and wait for the latest prank call to end up youtube, though I probably spoiled all the fun when I hung up as soon as I heard the repeated phrase.

moral of the story: always have at least one sip of coffee before answering the phone.

update, whoah the uncyclopedia presentation of Frank Garret is fantastic.