Kid Sparks Hilarious Group Text by Messing With Parents' Phone Settings

Jennifer O'Neill
·Writer
Updated
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Seventeen-year-old Brendan Gatward tweaked his parents’ phones so they couldn’t type the word “no.“ Even dad Jim tells Yahoo Parenting that the joke was “hilarious.” (Photo: Twitter)

Brendan Gatward’s parents just can’t say no to him. Seriously. The Michigan teen recently tweaked the settings on his mother’s and his father’s cellphones so that when they type in “No,” the words that actually appear onscreen read quite the opposite: “HELL YES” for his mom and “WHERE THE B—-ES AT” for his dad.

Naturally, the clever high school senior then asked his parents if he could throw a party. And the confusion that commenced from there is prank poetry — which has gone viral, with more than 1.8 million views on Imgur since it was uploaded this week.

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“HELL YES,” the 17-year-old’s mom replied via text, as shown in a screengrab of the exchange that Brendan tweeted Aug. 30 headlined simply, “lol, I changed “no” on my mom and dads phones.” Dumbfounded, his mother continues, “Wait” and “I typed HELL YES,” before imploring her husband for help. “Jim what is going on,” she typed. “I am saying HELL YES.”

Unfortunately, Brendan’s dad, Jim Gatward, was of little help with his intervention: “Brendan, she’s trying to say WHERE THE B—-ES AT.” The snarky son’s response? “Thanks you guys are the best.”

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But it’s the tech-savvy teen who’s being celebrated on social media, now that his original note has been retweeted 43,000 times and picked up by multiple news outlets, each of which declares him a “genius” for his joke.

Brendan downplayed the glory to BuzzFeed. “I was just playing a small prank … and it blew up,” he said. And though there’s no word yet on whether he got to host that party (Brendan didn’t respond to Yahoo Parenting’s request for comment), the teen did reveal that it took his parents about 10 minutes to sort out the snafu, and he has no regrets: “I’m glad I gave a bunch of people a good laugh.”

Even dad Jim admits to Yahoo Parenting, “It was hilarious.”

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