If You Prank Someone About Their Kid’s Health You Have No Soul

There are a lot of basic rules of etiquette to know and keep track of; always send thank you notes, say “excuse me” if you need to move past someone, and remember your magic words. Here’s another: the appropriate time to joke about or prank someone about the health and safety of a little kid is approximately never. I don’t go in for all of that vitriolic “mama bear” stuff, because I don’t think that there’s a whole lot of originality behind the “mess with my kids I’ll mess you up” train of thought given even the meekest parent is unlikely to sit with their thumb up their ass when their child is in danger.

That said, if someone thought it was hilarious to prank me about the health and well being of my child, I’d probably be angry enough to say something extremely cutting and yeah, I might make a few threats. Above all, I’d probably be pretty terrified. That’s what happened to a dad on Reddit who was relying on the mother of his daughter’s camp mates pick her up from summer camp. Apparently she gave him a wrong number and when he texted in to check up on her, he got some rando shitwhisker instead, who decided it might be fun to fuck with him:

Ugh. There’s a lot that happens after this, and you can see all of the dad’s images over at his post, including a sort of part two addendum. In that, the prankster plays the whole, “why so serious?” card and insists that he had no idea whether Bella was a child or a dog.

So, just because no one said it over there, I will:  I love my daughter more than my dog (obviously, he’s a major butthole) but I’d still be pretty pissed off if someone joked about him being sick, too, for no other reason than to thoroughly freak me out.

I was actually ready to give Mr. Hilarious the benefit of the doubt until it came out that he’s actually 29 years old. That’s one year older than me and 24 years older than I was when I first realized that certain things aren’t “pranks” they’re just you “being an enormous douchecanoe”.

On the other hand, the father in this scenario gets less than warm fuzzy feelings from me. First of all, I hate the word “cunt” in the same visceral way that I hate “moist” or “yeast”, but whatevs. Second of all, he probably should have called instead of texted. At least once. Thirdly, he broke the biggest rule of all; don’t feed a troll.

Seriously. His lecture on human decency was unlikely to have any effect on this little turd whatsoever, and he just gave him what he wanted; attention and a platform for his unclever shit. I mean, I would be mad too, but after figuring out that I was being played I like to think I wouldn’t waste any additional expensive data on this asshole.

Eventually the prankster apologized, but honestly? If you’ve gone this far in life without understanding why it’s messed up to scare people about their kid’s well being, I seriously doubt there’s a ton of sincerity there.

(Image: Martin Haas/Shutterstock)