Age of Paranoia

Now I will share with you a very distant and very bizarre memory. It was a time in my life where I lived in fear. I would shudder each time the phone would ring. I would have to run as fast as I could to get to my aunt's house from main street when it was night time.
The way it all began was an innocent childhood prank. My friends and my brother and I thought it would be funny to call the operator from our town's pay phone and ask silly questions, many involving a recently deceased woman named Ruby Drake. We would call and ask a question, laugh hysterically and hang up, then call again once we had regained our composure.
A short time later, my mother informed me that the KBI (yes, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation) had been sniffing around town, inquiring with local parents, searching for a team of youth who had been committing telephone fraud. Yes, apparently making prank calls from a pay phone was a serious offense, and the KBI was out for blood: my blood.
After that moment, I became easily scared. The slightest noise in my bedroom at night would cause me to think there was a KBI agent hiding outside my window. Whenever the phone rang, I imaginged it was the operator, calling me back to seek vengance. Anytime I had to pick up a phone, a chill would advance through my body. But the worst was when my parents would take me to town so they could use the gym, and I would have to go to my aunt's house. The infamous phone booth was about half-way between the gym and my aunt's, and the fear I felt when having to sprint past it was immesurable.
Did I think the phone booth was going to come alive and eat me? Did I think a figure in a black suit was going to apprehend me and put me in some sort of alcatraz for midwestern youth? I'm not sure what I thought, but as an overly dramatic kid, I'm pretty sure I was just psyching myself out. I really was afraid though, for quite awhile, that the KBI would "find me out" and I would be in some big, big trouble.
Looking back, I'm sure my mom just made up the bit about the KBI coming to town. She probably overheard us talking about the prank calls, or maybe one of my friends mother's had and told her.
The moral of the story is (and believe me I'm going to use this if I ever have kids), don't make prank calls to the operator.