There were times when I was setting up a line, I would ask, "Are you sure it can handle unlimited calls?" because I always knew there was a chance my stuff was going to go viral and get thousands of calls. What would happen if you would call and there were too many people trying to phone in at the same time? Would you get a busy signal?īusy signals I wasn't too concerned about because I felt like, regardless of whether people knew they were calling for a joke or not, a good percentage of them would call back. We crashed a lot of voicemail systems back in the early days before we figured out the telecom side of things-then we were able to handle thousands of concurrent calls because when the stuff went viral, we would literally get thousands of calls at the exact same time. Pretty soon we had crashed that whole system because it just wasn't designed to handle tons and tons of calls or a lot of simultaneous calls. All my clients had my personal number, so I had this business voice inbox that was just sitting there getting no calls, and I was paying $15 a month for it. The first business I had started was for web consulting. Wait, so it was a personal voice mailbox you set it up on? had about 300 varieties of Humor Hotlines, including the It Could Always Suck More and the Automated Sobriety Test lines, and probably 10–20 percent of them went viral and got millions of calls. I dubbed myself America's worst entrepreneur for the first two years because we were getting millions and millions of phone calls, and I was not yet making any money with it. Then we were doing a million calls a month, and it just kept growing. The next day I put up this voicemail message and told my friends, "This is what that girl should have given to that guy." My friends thought it was funny, and their friends thought it was, and next thing we knew, we were getting thousands and thousands of phone calls every day. Then we felt bad for him when she had enough and stood up and started screaming at him, embarrassing him in front of the whole bar. We were out at a bar one night having some drinks and people watching, and we saw this scene develop where we felt bad for a girl who was being hit on by this guy that she clearly wanted nothing to do with. Jeff Goldblatt: Basically, I was just being a wise ass trying to make my friends laugh. VICE: How did you come up with the idea to troll creeps with the Rejection Hotline? The other day I called him up to figure out how exactly how his legendary hotline came to be and to hear the voice of the guy who rejected millions in a single pre-recorded message. Despite spending no money on advertising, Goldblatt's hotline went viral to the point of garnering millions of calls and thousands of dollars in phone bills every month. The creator of the hotline, Jeff Goldblatt, who was 23 when he launched the hotline in 2001, now works out of Atlanta Tech Village in Georgia mentoring new entrepreneurs and working on several of his own projects. My friends and I spent much of our middle school years (and admittedly part of high school) abusing the Rejection Hotline, often passing the numbers around within our cliques during lunch period or after school, dialing in at sleepovers on our flip phones, or tricking complete strangers we met online in chatrooms into calling it. The cruel-but-hilarious message was a godsend for myself and others who often found themselves in uncomfortable situations of attempted conquest. And please, do your best to forget about the person who gave you this number, because trust us, they have already forgotten about you. Accept the fact that you were rejected, and then get over it. Regardless of the reason, please take the hint. Maybe you just give off that creepy overbearing, psycho-stalker vibe and the idea of going out with you just seems as appealing as playing leapfrog with unicorns. Maybe you suffer from bad breath, body odor, or a nasty combination of the two. Note: This could mean boring, dumb, annoying, arrogant or just a general weirdo. So, why were you given a Rejection Hotline number? Maybe you're just not this person's type. We know this sucks, but don't be too devastated. You have reached the Rejection Hotline! Unfortunately, the person who gave you this number did not want you to have their real number. Hello, this is in not the person you were trying to call.
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