Of course, school newspapers, student body politics, and disastrous high school romances were all regular growing-up things. What I wanted to do was something irregular, something unique. And so, at the beginning of my junior year, with thoughts of skyscrapers, worldwide media empires, and tremendous stock exchange valuations dancing in my head, I suggested to my best friend, Alex, that we start our own company. We had no proven abilities or track record, so we chose a business that seemed easy. For a couple of guys as creative and charming as we imagined ourselves to be, it was a no-lose proposition, foolproof, a guaranteed success. We opened our own advertising agency. At first it took some persuading, but then I told Alex I’d even let his name come first. And thus, Demac-Jonas Advertising was born.

True, we were only high school students. True, we had no employees. True, we had no clients. For that matter, if at that moment a large client would miraculously have appeared besieging us for our services, we would not have had the slightest idea what to do for him. None of this mattered to us, though. We were would-be magnates and we would learn.

I was able to secure a single empty room in an office in the Empire State Building that belonged to a friend of the family. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, but they said for the first year it would be rent-free. Alex, my partner, was able to convince the phone company to give us a catchy phone number in spite of the almost total unavailability of such numbers in Manhattan. We were off and running.

Actually, the number Alex secured was 1-212-565-1212. It soon became apparent to us why such a desirable number was still available so many decades after it was first issued. The number, you see, was only one digit off from 1-212-555-1212. This was the number any of the billions of people in the world wanting directory assistance for New York City would call when they needed a number. Apparently, in the era of dial telephones, if people misdialed, the number they most often missed by a digit would be the middle number. And judging by the fact that our new phone began ringing every two minutes, either a lot of people couldn’t dial straight or the total number of calls must have exceeded all imagination.

For our first two weeks, while working through the nights marking lists of prospective clients, we answered each of these calls and gave each caller the home number of our debate coach. Within a week, we observed him falling asleep in class, barely able to function. But finally even we couldn’t take the incessant ringing anymore, and Demac-Jonas Advertising chose discretion as the better part of valor and opted for a less glamorous number.