Big, Fat, and Stupid

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from an old co-worker who still worked at my old place of employment. It was a complimentary e-mail, fairly light in nature, which made it all the more mysterious why the e-mail header on my iPad read, “To: Big, Fat, and Stupid - From: <name omitted>”. Hmm… I asked him why that was what he had called me in his address book and he claimed innocense. I figured somebody at my old job was probably playing a funny joke by getting one of the IT guys to mess with my name on the company mail server.

I didn’t think much more about it for a couple of weeks until I found myself in the car with the whole family in tow. We were contemplating going to a movie, but didn’t know what was playing. Since I was driving, I enabled my iPhone’s digital assistant, Siri, and asked what movies were playing. As happens from time to time, the voice recognition didn’t work so well and Siri responded to me, “I’m sorry, Big, Fat, and Stupid, I don’t know how to do that.” The car erupted in a fit of laughter and things started to come into focus.

Two years ago when I first got this version of the iPhone, I remember showing the kids the Siri feature and how you could get her to call you different names just by talking to her. To demonstrate I said to her, “Call me Big Sexy.” After that, I left it like that. There seemed no reason to change it, afterall. Over time, Apple rolled the nickname feature out to other apps, including Mail. So that explained why my coworker’s e-mail was addressed to “Big, Fat, and Stupid.” What it didn’t explain was who perpetrated such a heinous joke on my person!

I addressed the car, all of whom were still laughing. I first looked at Ethan who said, “That’s hilarious, and I wish I had done it, but I didn’t…” I then turned to Jenny who simply stated, “You know I didn’t do it - I don’t even know how to do that!” Which left me with the only person I knew who had the gumption, know-how, and inventiveness to commit this crime. He was smiling to himself with his eyes focused intently on his iPod screen, playing a game. I asked him and he fessed up. Still not wanting to believe he did it, I asked him how he managed to do the deed. He calmly explained, “you were in the shower, and your iPhone was in the office. So I went in there and said to Siri, Siri, call me Big, Fat, and Stupid, but I said it soft so you wouldn’t hear me.”

To me the most impressive part of this joke is also the most frightening. Quin clearly did this several weeks prior. He somehow, as a six year old, managed to resist the urge to force me into immediate discovery, instead opting for the far more potentially devastating punchline of me discovering it on my own at a later time, wondering what had really happened…