Well here’s a stupid (but funny!) story

Travis has never been serious for more than about a minute at a time. He’s my best friend in the world, but I also yell at him multiple times a week about being facetious or sarcastic or what-have-you for no reason other than to get me to yell at him.

Laurie and I have discussed getting a new couch (you might remember the origin story). I messaged him about the frustration of the process (do we get an affordable couch that the boys will destroy fast, or a ridiculously expensive one that the boys will still destroy but slower, and why on earth is there NO MIDDLE GROUND?!), and his oh-so-helpful advice was to send to me, and then separately to Laurie, links to theater-style seating reclining fancy chairs that were multiple thousand dollars … per seat. For a day or two, he kept track of how long he’d gone without a sarcastic comment, but it lasted only that day or two, and he is the anti-Cal Ripken beyond that. Can’t even go a day.

Now, in the interest of total fairness, I rival him in this department. I’m a smartass. Sarcastic to a fault. It’s no great mystery why we are friends.

Which brings me to today, Thursday. We started out talking about the pharmaceutical companies working on a Covid vaccine (because despite our regular smartassness, we also discuss serious topics), then out of nowhere, Travis changes subjects by saying “Chicks dig me man.” A few seconds later, the screenshot comes through of an obvious spam text that says “hey is this Travis? Are you still single? Im bored lol. Check out my pics here and if you like what you see lets meet up xoxo Amy.”

That’s obviously a joke, so I continued with the obvious-a-joke game. I screenshotted that and sent it to our group text that includes Lindsey, Travis’ wife and one of my best friends in her own right. Along with it I wrote, “As a concerned friend, I feel obligated to tell you that Travis appears to be engaged in a text flirtation with a young lady named Amy.”

Travis, having seen that, sent a text to Lindsey as well that said, “I have a confession to make” and included some sort of jokey gif.

That’s basically harmless. Lindsey knows we’re both goofy.

Except.

Except.

So Lindsey was at work when these texts came in, and too busy to look at her phone. What she could look at, however, was her Apple Watch, which would display the texts … but not the additional media. So what she got was me saying Travis was ducking out on her and him saying he had a confession, but none of the supplementary material that clarified it was a joke. So she spent the next little bit (couldn’t have been 20 minutes, really, but still) having read that stuff but not understanding the context.

And to be clear, I don’t think for even a second that Lindsey saw that stuff and thought it was real. I don’t think she spent that 20 minutes or so worrying that her husband of more than a decade was cheating on her, or that the way she would find out is a text from his friend. But I do think she spent that 20-ish minutes thinking “What the hell are these two morons doing now?”

That’s the end of the story, really. I told Laurie about it when she got home from our daughter’s dentist appointment, and she laughed a lot and texted Lindsey “Sorry our husbands are idiots.” Lindsey wasn’t upset.

But come on, I almost broke up a marriage because I wanted to make a joke. How dumb is that.