UPLAND, Calif. — A team of construction workers was surprised and overjoyed when a local dad took interest in what they were building and proceeded to trap them in semi-hostage conversation for nearly an hour, sweaty sources confirmed.
“I couldn’t help but break out into a huge smile when Steve flagged us down,” Marty Gibbs, one of the workers on the site, said while still beaming. “What a great guy! He was so interested in the details of building a mixed-use property, and he had some great suggestions for how we could work more efficiently. He even cracked a few jokes, one of them was something about like, having time to clean and time to lean. You had to be there. Needless to say, I was more than happy to stop the work I was in the middle of and tell him about the project for 45 minutes.”
Bridget Feldman, Steve’s adult daughter, was with her dad and witnessed the whole event.
“It was a sight to behold,” she said. “The first guy called over another guy, and he called over another. Each worker was more excited than the last to tell my dad the specifics of this building or whatever, and the estimated date of completion. They completely forgot I was even there. Then my dad invited them to dinner at his house and they all cheered, took their construction hats off and left together. I had to call an Uber to get home.”
According to sociologist Samantha Moreno, this phenomenon is more common than people realize.
“This is what we call ‘folie à dad’ or ‘dad madness,’” said Moreno while shaking her head solemnly. “It’s a kind of shared agitation that sometimes occurs between fathers and the people they’re trying to corner in a given social situation. The recipient of the attention feels happy or special while being tirelessly interrogated. To many of us, this is unfathomable, but dads are operating on a level of weirdness that is not fully understood by science yet.”
At press time, Feldman was 90 minutes into telling a barista about how he used to work at a coffee shop and knows “a thing or two” about making espresso.