Massachusetts Featured in Wild New Netflix Documentary ‘Don’t Pick Up the Phone’

With a huge amount of people cashing in on their vacation time during the last couple of weeks of the year, streaming service binging is going to start hitting an all-time high.

Which means there's a solid chance that most people are going to wrap up whatever current series' they're binging and be on the hunt for new ones. And at the time of this writing, there's a 3-episode Netflix documentary series currently in the Netflix Top 10 that features Massachusetts.

Don't Pick Up the Phone on Netflix

The good thing about this new true crime-ish documentary that just hit Netflix, Don't Pick Up the Phone, is that it's a wicked quick watch. Three episodes, all no longer than about 50 minutes.

The bad thing? Holy hell is it one massively messed up story that gets pretty uncomfortable at times, even within the first 15 minutes or so of episode one.

And naturally, Massachusetts is tied to it.

Fast food in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts

Back in 2004, a fast food restaurant in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was one of four Massachusetts fast food restaurants hit by the focus on Don't Pick Up the Phone -- bogus, hoax phone calls made by someone impersonating a police officer.

According to the new Netflix documentary, currently sitting at #7 on the Netflix Top 10 most-watched TV show list, the fake police officer would call a fast food restaurant and tell the manager that they had received a call from a customer claiming to have had money stolen by an employee earlier in the day.

The fake officer would then give a generic description of an employee that just about every fast food chain in the country -- a petite teenager with blonde hair, somewhere about 5 feet tall. Once the manager called the employee fitting that description into their office, what followed was disgusting, disturbing, and insanely illegal.

The caller somehow convinced the managers to conduct a strip search of the "accused" employee as opposed to having it done at the police station. And as if that isn't disturbing enough, some of the actions performed by the managers to their employee -- regardless of the fact they were instructed by the fake officer -- it's literally not believable.

But believe it, because it happened.

According to Don't Pick Up the Phone, it happened over 100 times across the country between 1994 and 2004. Not only were the four Massachusetts locations hit, but for a brief second in the third episode, a camera shot that runs through a list quickly shows that two different cities in Maine -- Scarborough and likely Rockport (even though it was listed as Foxport) -- were hit as well.

The series takes you through not only the disturbing and traumatizing situations that the employees went through, but also how a Massachusetts Detective worked with a Kentucky Detective to incredibly narrow down the person they believe made the calls (on pay phones, by the way), a man named David Stewart.

What happened to David? Exactly how far did some of the managers go during these random strip searches? How in the blue hell did David (or whoever made these calls) convince these managers to do some unthinkable things to their employees?

It's all on Netflix for you. I can't comment more about it here because I equal parts don't want to post spoilers and also don't want to get fired for the endless rant I'd go on.