How to prank a Telemarketer
| How to prank a Telemarketer | |
|---|---|
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| Creator: | Sphonix |
| Created on: | October 14, 2006 |
| Sound origin: | Bob and Tom Show |
| Image origin: | Made by Sphonix |
| Profile | |
"How to prank a Telemarketer" is a YTMND centered around a prank phone call. The audio is a phone call played on the Bob and Tom radio show accompanied by text narration. The call was a prank recorded by comedian Tom Mabe when a telemarketer called his home. When the telemarketer asked to speak to Mabe, Mabe impersonated a police officer conducting a homicide investigation. Mabe badly scares the telemarketer by making him a suspect in the investigation and asking for his personal whereabouts on the night of the alleged murder.
Popularity and controversy
A link to the site appeared on many very popular forums resulting in a steady increase of views from the time of the site's creation on October 14th, 2006. It had been the Top Viewed YTMND of every day since then, at its peak receiving over 100,000 views per day.
The site has incited anger in many users due to its enormous number of views and lack of original content. Others said that sites like this should only be hosted on eBaum's World. Additionally, many believe that this site may have brought in a huge number of NARVs to YTMND.
The YTMND populace soon realized that due to massive amounts of views, HTPAT would soon pass the Blue Ball machine in terms of views, the site which had held the honor of top viewed site of all time for over a year. On November 29th, user Ochobobo created Approaching Blue Ball Machine, bringing this fact to the attention of the public. Many viewers became enraged by this and demanded that the site be removed for alleged viewhacking. Anti-HTPAT sites were made, including Every day is the same and DESTROY IT!. max added the site to the Hall of Fame on November 30th, much to the dismay of many YTMNDers.
On December 21, 2006, the site finally passed Blue Ball Machine as YTMND's new top viewed site. Many predicted this event would happen this very day. Since then, the amount of views per day on the site has begun dropping.
Additionally, since January 1, 2007, it also became the site with the largest amount of comments, passing even Dr-L337's site, DR-L337'S DAY OFF, but was later surpassed by Dave Cockrum. On 21 February 2007, the site reached 7,000,000 views. On 23 February 2007, all Hall of Fame sites (including HTPAT and Blue Ball Machine) were removed from the Top Viewed list, regardless of how many views they had. This makes Wow is serious business the most viewed YTMND of All Time (that is, Top Viewed while still not being inducted to the HoF). It pleased many to see it off the front page at last, though the site brings approximately 800 views a day on average, nearly enough to be on the day's top viewed.
"Legal muscle"
On February 1, 2007, Max received a threatening email from somebody claiming to be Tom Mabe. In the letter, Mabe complained that the telemarketer YTMND site was hurting sales of his CD by giving its content away for free, and demanded that max pay him a percentage of the advertising revenue generated by the site. Max responded with a sarcastic message, pointing out that Mabe had received tons of free press thanks to the telemarketer site's popularity on YTMND.
Shortly after Max had updated the user community on this situation via the news page (along with what some users interpreted as a promise to delete the increasingly controversial site once and for all), the telemarketer site was hacked, its background image changed to a photo of a man being urinated on. This was probably done as both a symbolic expression of contempt for the site, and as a way of killing its enduring popularity. Whether the hack was Max's doing is still unclear. The change, though welcome for many, was short-lived, because the next day the site's owner, Sphonix, changed it right back. No further news on this issue has appeared since, and few questions have as yet been answered.
