Funniest Story I've Heard In A Long Time

I had the day off from work today.  Aside from the few tedious things that I needed to handle, I didn't have a whole lot of obligations.  So, when my youngest brother mentioned that my mother had invited everyone over for dinner, I was free to join the festivities.  My sister was working, but my other little brother and his wife were able to make it.  So we had a little unscheduled get-together for some pizza and breadsticks.

Quite a bit of the conversation surrounded the fact that my brother Jake, along with the entire fire department where he works, received a 30-day layoff notice today.  Apparently the story had been on Fox News and everything.  I had seen the story on Drudge myself, although it appears to have been bumped off the headlines by Charlie Sheen and Gaddafi (or Qaddafi or Khadaffi or whatever the hell his name is).

Heartless union-busting firefighter-hating politicians and their hopeless red ink are not the funny part of the story though.  My father was the funny one.

For a little background, my father has never used a computer.  I don't mean this in a hyperbolic sense.  I mean that he has actually never used a computer.  I could plop him in front of any given machine and tell him to turn it on.  He wouldn't know what to do.  So, naturally, his understanding of the internet is rather limited.  He has some vague notion regarding people who send messages and order things from the internet, but that's about it.

For a little more background, around a year ago my parents got rid of their home phone line.  Mom has her cell phone and Dad has his.  Nobody has any trouble reaching either of them, so the arrangement seems to work well enough.  It's one of those family plan arrangements, so my father's phone can send and receive text messages even though he's not much of a texter.  Mom, on the other hand, is like the rest of you degenerates - just texting away.

Now for the story:  Apparently someone posted some naked pictures on the internet and included a phone number with the pictures - my father's phone number.  Whether it was a typo, a random act of goofiness, or an intentional prank against Dad, nobody really knows.  What I do know is that I was treated to a good fifteen minutes of him talking about the various people from around the country who kept calling his phone last Saturday night.  The phone would ring, some random guy would say that he had the wrong number, and my father would get incrementally more pissed as the night wore on.  Adding to the hilarity, he received a handful of text messages of the 'I wanna fuck you' variety.  (Those picures must have been pretty nice or something.)  My father, as I've already noted, is not well versed in the ways of the text message, so these random hits were rather confusing to him.

By the time Dad finished telling the story, he was awfully agitated.  It was as if he was reliving the frustration of the event itself.  As for the rest of us, we were nearly in tears.  I don't think any of us had laughed so hard in quite some time.  Of all the people to fall victim to the wiles of the internet, of course it would have to be the one guy who has quite literally no idea how the whole thing works.  Absolutely hilarious.