“How are you doing?”
A friend of ours
responded (as many would) with: “Who is this?”
“Your mom,” was
the reply.
Figuring this
must be a joke from one of his friends, he played along.
When he was out
on a Saturday night, he received a text from the same number: “how is your foot
doing?”
“It’s turned a weird shade of green,” he
texted.
“Remember to get
more bandages.”
“I forgot to pick
them up at Walmart.” Later on, he texted
something about not forgetting to bring the Minute Maid.
Sure, it seemed
sort of strange that someone was texting him over a period of several days
asking about his foot (when he hasn’t injured it), telling him someone named
Ingrid would bring things for him (when he knows no one named Ingrid), and talking
about meeting up when the person had never given any identity clues, but again,
our friend assumed it was one of his friends just playing a joke on him, so he
kept playing along.
Last night, he
got a voicemail from
the person who’d been texting him. Turns out the person who’d been sending him
messages for several days really is a mom who’d thought she was texting her son.
From the message, our friend could tell the woman was confused as to
what was going on judging by the strange responses she’d gotten to her sincere
questions and suggestions about her son’s injured foot.
Oops! Our friend was genuinely surprised to receive
this voicemail and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. Clearly the woman had made a mistake. Our friend texted back “This is not who you
think it is.”
Several possible
solutions came as to how to handle the awkward situation. “Text: ‘I’m leaving the family and moving to
Cali’ or ‘I’m going back to Afghanistan in the morning,’” were two of the many "helpful"
suggestions offered in in jest.
Our friend’s
brother was reading over the text message exchange while we had this
brainstorming session, and he went ahead and called the
woman. Laughing, he told her that
there’d been a mix-up, and that she’d had the wrong number. She apologized and said something about him
not sounding like Jacob.
WARNING:
If you nonchalantly text answers you’d send to a practical joking friend
without knowing who’s actually receiving them, you risk scandalizing some poor
confused mother liable to end up in the loony bin thinking her son has lost
every last ounce of his home training. 
