Hello, can I speak to Tai Yee Ngau?

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I am sure all of us must have got a wrong number call at least once. Recently someone kept calling my number and asked for a “Fei Chai Loong” (Little Fat Dragon in Cantonese). This guy called me no less than 10 times over 3 days even though I kept telling him there was no such person and he must have got the wrong number. After the 7th or 8th call, I was quite fed up and angry with him. Finally he stopped.

This reminds me of a prank my schoolmates and I used to play on people during our school days. Every now and then when we were bored, we would make prank calls at random. It was quite hilarious to us but was quite mean to the person we picked randomly.

We made calls from public phones (just simply dial a number) and once a call got through we will ask for a person with a funny Chinese name, like Tai Yee Ngau (which means Big Ear Bull in Cantonese). We knew it was very unlikely there was such a character. And the person on the other side will most probably say it was a wrong number. But then we kept arguing that we got the number from Tai Yee Ngau and insist on speaking to him. We will argue as long as we can until the person got fed up and hung up.

Then we will wait for a while and made another call to the same number and ask for Tai Yee Ngau again. We did this a couple more times until the person was really irritated and practically screaming at the other end.

But that was not the last of it. The finale was that we made one last call and when the person answers the phone, we will say “Hello, I am Tai Yee Ngau, did anyone call me?” That was when you can hear the hysterical screams of all sorts of four letter words … that was the climax we were looking for.

Come to think about it now, we were quite a mischievous bunch. I admit, we were all rascals. If you ever got such a call during the late 70s, it could have been one of our pranks. Thousand apologies!

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