When you accidentally text the wrong person and have a whole conversation with a phantom version of the person you thought you texted.

Ibought a new stove because I didn’t want a gas stove with two young children. After moving into this new home, I paid an electrician to run a 220v line from my basement to the kitchen, and it left behind this awful-looking footlong pipe sticking out of my floor. I don’t know anything about gas, but I figured I should at least cap off this pipe behind the stove in case the valve was ever turned accidentally.

Since moving to Minnesota a few months ago, I’ve been fortunate to find a great plumber. The first time I hired him it was just a minor water leak that turned out to be an O-ring in the water main. It was such a neat transaction: in the span of about five seconds, I offered him a hundred, he said make it fifty, so I gave him sixty because I only had twenties and so he gave me a twenty back, insisting we settle at forty. It was done. I valued his experience. He appreciated my business. It was fair. He left and I looked around wondering what else I can get this guy to work on.

I said to my wife, “We have a plumber now.”

To remove the gas pipe from behind the stove, he promptly showed up at 8am as promised and swiftly kicked off his shoes without asking or ever having mentioned it. I showed him in the basement where I’ve removed the ceiling panels for him to access the pipes to view his task. Within minutes he assessed the situation to determine how far back he could go to pull the pipe. He’s back up the stairs now and going outside to shut off the gas. I watch him eagerly to learn, because I don’t have experience with gas and wanted to know where the shutoff is in case of emergency. He showed me where to make the quarter turn, and how there are actually two places that can shut it off — a redundancy, which would have certainly confused me had I not known.

We are back downstairs shutting off breakers now but I’m not trying to hover over him while he works, so I go upstairs to check on the kids and come back downstairs to find that he’s also coming back down the stairs, because he slipped up the stairs so sleekly when I walked away for a minute. The pipe was gone. His work was done. I missed it. It’d only been seven or nine minutes. Amazing. My college degree is bullshit.

He spent a few minutes resetting the furnace for me and from the moment he arrived until the moment I handed him the two hundred dollars we’d previously agreed on, it had not even been thirty minutes. A good morning for both of us I’d say.

I remarked to my wife again how we’d found our plumber.

Later that evening around 7pm we realized there was no hot water and quickly figured that the water heater probably needed to be reset like the furnace. I have no experience with gas and frankly do not fancy having to hold a match near a gas pipe while having no experience doing such things. I’m willing to learn, but I don’t have a long lighter to reach the pilot, or any experience whatsoever with lighting a pilot. It’s almost 8pm and I’ve heard enough scary disclaimer-talk in the YouTube videos, where I’ve been scouring for knowledge as I prepare to do this for the first time after living my electric-based life in Florida. So, I decide to wait and just text our plumber in the morning. Surely it will be no trouble for him to stop by. Besides, for all I know, maybe he turned something else off and lighting the pilot isn’t even the answer. It makes enough sense to go to bed and text him in the morning. We can do one night without hot water before I go around looking for makeshift pilot-lighting materials to hold under this gas line that honestly for all I know could be a blinker fluid pipe.

Now here’s the point of the whole story I’m telling you.

The day before our plumber came to remove the pipe, we had sold the old gas stove to some nice lady who had replied to the for-sale ad on Facebook. So, I had her phone number in my recent texts. I also had not yet programmed our new plumber’s name into my phone, so what happened was…

I accidentally texted this lady who bought the stove from me the day before, thinking it was my plumber the whole time.

That’s not funny. What IS funny, is that she responded to me — all day, helping me troubleshoot. What is even FUNNIER is that I exchanged messages with her all throughout the day thinking my amazing plumber had lost his whole entire mind, and that I might need someone to come check his work in my kitchen.

With no further ado, here is the text conversation I had with the lady who I thought was our plumber but really, the whole time she and her husband were probably thinking they will never buy anything from anybody on Facebook ever again:

I finally reached out to my plumber who happily came over to fix it immediately even though it was after hours by then. But it was a mind trip because my once-great perception of this plumber worsened throughout the day and then rose even higher. I printed out this conversation for him to read and told him how I thought I’d been talking with him all day. I joked that he needed to read what he’s been saying because I don’t think he’s going to stand by some of it.

I’ve got his number programmed into my phone now.