ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Local dad Will Lowe somehow managed to accidentally “reply all” the national emergency alert test FEMA sent to all devices in America moments ago, humiliated family members confirmed.
“I was trying to text my wife, asking if she’d pick up some Better Cheeses while she was at the store. At least that’s who I thought I was messaging. Turns out I was replying to about 330 million people who were not happy to hear from me,” said Lowe while trying to figure out how to deactivate his phone. “Yeah, I really stepped in it with this one. Almost immediately my kids started texting me those funny little faces and reminding me that ‘Better Cheeses’ isn’t a real brand. But that wasn’t as bad as the thousands of death threats I got from all the people I texted. My phone got so hot it actually burned my hand.”
Brett Charles, a dad from Indianapolis, was furious to see this message arrive.
“First off, this is a blatant invasion of privacy by the government, which just confirms all those rumors about 5G I’ve been hearing. And then, to add insult to injury, I get this green message on my phone! Do you know how hard I’ve worked to boot every Android out of my group texts? So of course I immediately texted back calling the guy a dickless moron and demanding to be unsubscribed,” said Charles, still breathing heavily and shaking slightly. “This was followed up by a string of name-signed-texts asking that I refrain from messaging further and that they be unsubscribed too. At this point, I was seeing red, so I did the only thing I could: I shot back a lengthy text asking that they all refrain from texting me further.”
Demi Bailey, a long-time government employee, has worked on this project for several years.
“Look, we did get a number of bids for some pretty robust systems that would deliver these messages in a private and secure manner. But as you know, we are required to accept the lowest bid, which was basically just some guy who put every phone number in a spreadsheet and then sent a giant group text,” said Bailey. “I admit it was not the most elegant solution, but we’re just excited to finally be using some new technology. When these proposals were submitted, we required they be mailed on floppy disks.”
At press time, FEMA confirmed that millions of dads texting each other to stop texting had crashed the Emergency Alert System and would require further testing.