A telephone conversation is analyzed in which two participants interact within a fabricated frame (Goffman, 1974; Tannen and Wallat, 1993). The main objective here is to describe the interactional ecology that allows ‘the fabricator’ to keep his addressee within a single layer of activity, and allows ‘the victim’ herself to contribute to the fabrication. While the fabricator juggles the frames of a fictitious service encounter and of a practical joke, the victim participates unknowingly in the fabrication, believing she is engaged in a bona fide service encounter. Contextualization cues and mismatches in the participants' knowledge schemas prove insufficient to lead to the shifting of the fabricated frame. The deceived participant does not act on the fabricator's inadvertent or deliberate cues, and tends to normalize the mismatches in their knowledge schemas, until the fabricator abruptly quits the interaction, and the fabricated frame collapses. The deceived participant and a third interactant then have to deal with frame ambiguity, misframing and clarification of frame. This evidence underscores the power of framing in conversational processing, supporting the view that participants to talk-in-interaction tend to stay in the existing frame and display a strong orientation to making experience conform to what is perceived as ordinary, even when it is deliberately nonsensical.