OUR OFFICE VOICEMAIL – We’ve just received a voicemail from a boomer dad. Could be your dad, or anyone’s dad for all we know. Honestly, we don’t really know. What we do know, is that it stood out amid the usual morass of death threats, robocalls, and telemarketers trying to sell us timeshares and ED pills. After 10 minutes of dial-up tones, we heard the following:
“Heya kiddo, it was pretty lonely without you home for the holidays. I know I warned you that the booster was a Deep State bioweapon that’d blow your hand off with the shrapnel of detonating GPS microchips, but can we extend hands of forgiveness?” said Dad.
“You and your generation get way too uptight over simple differences of opinion! Why can’t we just agree to disagree that every tragedy’s a crisis actor stage play? Or that your generation should have less rights than mine, or if our galaxy is being run by an extraterrestrial federation of flightless birds?”
After deviating into a 5 minute side tangent explaining how the 1986 film “Howard The Duck” was actually “predictive programming” and “science fact, not fiction”, Dad seemed to put 2 and 2 together that he didn’t have his kid’s number. But not before going on another 17-minute tangent about how his kid’s life savings should be entirely invested into precious metals.
“First letter of the word quack? Q. Quartz. Q Clearance. It’s right there in plain sight! I know I told you not to believe everything on the internet, but Howard The Duck came out before the Internet! A trustworthy CIA insider with 11 subscribers told me about Howard’s ties to JFK Jr on the YouTube. Why would they lie about something like that on the Internet? Hello? Kiddo? Are you there?”
After five more minutes of having his “hellos” answered by no one, Dad finally remembered that Caller ID exists, and realized he mistakenly reached a publisher that publishes words that you shouldn’t fully take as gospel on the Internet.
“Hard Drive? Thought you guys were tech support at first, but uh, I admire your beat reporting! Reminds me of this Tucker segment I saw about Vaporeon, most honest man in journalism by the way. I was a sort of video gamer myself in my heyday, even had the sixth highest score on my arcade’s Pong cabinet! Anywho, any of you got any idea why my kids no longer talk to me?
“They told me to go to therapy, but my Facebook groups tell me they’re all the therapy I need!
I put a roof over their heads, put food on their plates, and even bought their first car! Granted, I threatened to bludgeon their heads against the doors of said car if they ever scratched the paint, but what more does it take to show a little gratitude?”
Dad also went on to suggest that the very phone he was calling us from was going to kill him, he finally hung up after seemingly dropping the phone in a bowl of soup.
