Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 1-900 numbers here in the United States were quite popular. Commercials were popping up all the time, urging the viewer to call 1-900-whatever to experience just about anything. Late night TV leaned hard on sexual escapades. I called one of those lines once and the guy sounded too hot and I hung on him. Too intimidating.
I remembering hearing ads on Kiss 108 in Boston. They went something like, “Are you gay? Does gay life intrigue you? Call 1-900-BE-THE-GAY (or whatever)…” and for only $2 a minute, after $4 for the first minute, you could talk to gay people.
Not once did I ever hear a word about “grooming” back then.
Most famously, Dionne Warwick (she had dropped her optional “e” by then), led the Psychic Friends Network. Dionne showed all her teeth and glory in rabid infomericals, urging viewers to call a 1-900 number to get a reading from a renowned psychic. I think her name was Linda Gregorian or something ordinary like that. You think she would have had a name like “Zesty Zelda” or something, but no, you could talk to Linda for $6 a minute on your Alltel bill.
I never called it.
For some reason I recently remembered an ad for a 1-900 line where people could call in so they could start crying. “Everyone needs a good cry once in a while”. I couldn’t bring myself to call into this line to see what was going on the other end of the wire, but I remember the relentless images of people crying on the phone in this ad to be quite upsetting.
Posting this screenshot from the ad is still quite upsetting to me.
I had a friend back in the day that called this number once and they said there was a calm voice telling a sad story about someone close to the narrator dying or something. This was back during Desert Storm; even in 1990 there was enough in the news to cry about, I didn’t need to rack up money on my New England Telephone bill to find a reason to cry. Not really fitting into the social scene of Boston was reason enough for me to cry, let alone all the stuff going on in the news back then.
Of course, 1-900 numbers gave way to the Internet. And with the Information Highway and the constant bombardment of other people’s business, we all have plenty of reasons to cry now.
