Family communication can be very complicated, which is definitely the case with writer Jonno Hopkins, who wrote a story on Twitter about how he’s been texting some random man on WhatsApp instead of his dad for half a year.
“For 6 months there’s been someone in my family whatsapp group who I thought was my dad but was in fact a random called Peter (my dad’s name),” he began. “This person has sat and read every message and never thought to chime in to inform us that we’ve added the wrong Peter.”
This is his family, with his real dad in the picture instead of the random man on the group chat:
He says that his family is “messy” because of a divorce, so that kind of explains the lapse. The biggest issue is that he didn’t add his “dad” contact, choosing his father’s first name instead.
His father eventually asked to be added to the chat via Hopkins’ sister, because he was embarrassed to ask directly:
This could have carried on for literally years had my sister not asked if I could add dad to the whatsapp group (I guess my dad was too embarrassed to ask me because I’m a snooty tech arse). And it dawned on me that the number of the Peter in the group was not my dad’s number
— Jonno (@jonnohopkins) February 24, 2021
People had a lot of questions about the situation, specifically, who the hell is Peter? It turns out that he was a plumber who had been at the family’s home and ruined their laundry. He also had an icon on Whatsapp of a builder’s logo, which no one noticed before:
What’s important is the real family has been reunited in the digital sphere, and Peter is finally free.