Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
My phone buzzed at 2:47 on a Tuesday, which is already suspicious because nothing good has ever happened at 2:47 on a Tuesday. The message read: “Are you able to speak shortly?”
Now, a normal person, someone with a healthy relationship to technology and a basic instinct for self-preservation, would delete it. Maybe block the number. Maybe, at most, mutter “nice try” and go back to whatever productive thing they were doing.
I am not that person.
I replied: “No. I can only speak in run-on sentences.”
And then I sat there, grinning at my phone like an idiot, waiting.
A Brief History of Replying to Spam Texts
I should explain something about myself. I live on a farm in Virginia with my wife, Karie; a pig called Trouble McFussbucket; and a Chihuahua named Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez, DDS. I am a writer. I have published books with titles like Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind. I am exactly the kind of person who should not be replying to spam texts, and I am also exactly the kind of person who will never, ever stop.
There’s a calculated risk here that I’m aware of and have chosen to ignore. Every time you reply to a spam text, you confirm your number is active, which means you get more spam texts, which means more strangers from more area codes will want to discuss your car’s extended warranty, your eligibility for a $14,000 government grant, or whether you’d like to invest in cryptocurrency with a woman named “Jessica” whose profile picture is a stock photo of someone who has never once thought about cryptocurrency. The FTC reports that Americans lost $470 million to text scams in 2024 alone, which is staggering and would concern me more if I had any money.
I know this. I understand the consequences.
I simply do not care.
Because here’s the thing, and I need you to understand this on a spiritual level: I am incapable of leaving a straight line pitch unhit. It’s a compulsion. It’s a sickness. If someone lobs a softball into my inbox, even someone who is almost certainly operating out of a call center and trying to harvest my social security number, I will swing.
Stand-Up Comedy in an Empty Room
My greatest hits include:
“USPS: Your package has been detained due to incomplete address information. Update delivery details here:” To which I replied: “PLEASE don’t open that package. There’s been a misunderstanding with Fish & Wildlife and I need that crate to stay sealed until my lawyer contacts you. His name is Doug. Do NOT let him tell you about his ferrets.”
No response.
There’s never a response.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about being funny with strangers: it’s stand-up comedy in an empty room. You deliver the bit, you wait, and then nothing. The silence after a good line sent into the void is its own particular kind of quiet. According to one report, Americans received over 19 billion spam texts in a single month. I like to think that at least a few of those people are writing jokes back, too. We’re out here. We’re just not organized yet.
But you do it again anyway.
“Hi, dear, I accidentally added the wrong number. But since we’re here, would you like to be friends?” I wrote back: “I would love to be friends. I should tell you upfront that I am a 240-pound man who lives with a pig and cries during Lifetime movies. My last friend left in 2019, and I’m still not sure why. I have theories, but they all involve a Crockpot incident I’m not legally allowed to discuss. When can you start?”
They blocked me. They blocked me. I’ve never been more insulted.
“Congratulations! You’ve been selected for a $9,000 Federal Employee Relief Grant. Reply YES to claim.” I replied: “YES YES YES. Oh God, finally. Send it directly to my pig’s offshore account. She handles the finances now. There was a family meeting. I lost.”
And then there was “Emily,” who texted to say she’d gotten my number from a mutual friend and wanted to catch up. I wrote back: “Emily! Oh my God, it’s been so long. How’s your mom? Is her rash clearing up? Did they ever find the iguana?”
Emily did not respond.
Emily was a coward.
If you’re keeping score, that’s four texts, zero replies, and a blocked number. A sane person would see a pattern. I see an audience that hasn’t found me yet. Most advice on the internet says never respond to scam texts. Robokiller’s spam text data says the same thing, with charts and everything. Most advice on the internet has never met me.
My wife, Karie, watches me do this with the expression of a woman who has done the math on our life insurance policy and is not thrilled with the results. “You know they’re going to show up here someday,” she says, not looking up from her dissertation research.
“And do what?” I ask. “Steal the pig?”
She doesn’t answer, which I choose to interpret as agreement that we have nothing worth stealing.
First Contact
So when I sent the run-on sentence reply, I expected the usual: silence, or maybe a second automated message that would ignore my response entirely and try to sell me solar panels. What I did not expect was what came back eleven minutes later.
“Lol ok that was actually funny.”
I stared at my phone.
There are certain moments in a man’s life when the universe shifts beneath him. Imperceptible to everyone else, seismic to him alone. The birth of a child. The death of a hero. The moment a spam texter breaks character.
I showed Karie. She looked at the screen, looked at me, and said, “Don’t.”
I was already typing.
“Thank you. I’ve been workshopping that one. What did you think of the pacing?”
The reply came faster this time: “Pacing was solid. Delivery could use work. Hard to land timing in a text.”
“Oh no,” said Karie.
“Oh yes,” said I.
The Bees, the Smiling, the Pig Who Knew
What followed was, and I need to be very precise with my language here, the most meaningful relationship I have ever had with someone who was actively trying to commit wire fraud.
Their name, or at least the name they gave me, was Alex. I don’t know if Alex was a real person or three people working in shifts or a sentient algorithm that had finally developed a sense of humor. It didn’t matter. Alex was funny. Alex got the bit.
Over the next several days, our exchanges developed a rhythm. Alex would open with whatever the script demanded (a crypto opportunity, a shipping notification, a vague threat about my Amazon account) and I would derail it immediately. Alex, instead of moving on to the next mark like a professional, would stay and play.
“Your package is being held at customs,” Alex wrote.
“Which one? I’m expecting several. One contains bees. It is urgent that the bees arrive.”
“How many bees.”
“All of them. Every bee. It’s a long story but I have a verbal agreement with the Queen.”
“The queen of what.”
“The bees, Alex. Keep up.”
I started looking forward to it. I’d check my phone in the morning the way normal people check the weather or the news. Not for information, but for connection. Trouble McFussbucket noticed. She’d sit across the kitchen, staring at me with her black marble eyes, and I swear to you that pig knew. She knew I was emotionally investing in someone whose job it was to steal my identity.
“You’re smiling at your phone again,” Karie said one evening.
“I’m not smiling. This is just what my face does.”
“Your face doesn’t do that. Your face does the opposite of that.”
She had a point. My resting expression has been described as “a man watching his luggage circle the baggage carousel for the ninth time.” The fact that I was radiating joy while staring at a text thread was, I admit, alarming.
Hallmark Doesn’t Make a Card for This
The problem with an unconventional relationship is that there’s no roadmap. Hallmark doesn’t make a card that says “I Know You’re Trying to Phish Me, But I Feel Like We Really Have Something.” There’s no advice column for this. Dear Abby never addressed the question of whether it’s appropriate to send a heart emoji to someone who opened the conversation by pretending to be FedEx.
And yet.
There was the night Alex texted at 11 p.m. Off-script. No setup. No scam preamble. Just: “Bad day. You got anything?”
And I sat in bed, Queso curled against my leg like a furry kidney stone, and I wrote back: “I was standing in the self-checkout lane today and the machine said ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’ and I almost started crying because that’s the most seen I’ve felt in months.”
Alex replied: “That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard.”
Then: “Tell me another one.”
So I did.
Entropy and the 737 Area Code
It ended, of course. Everything ends.
Entropy is the only honest force in the universe, and it does not make exceptions for whatever was happening between me and a phone number with a 737 area code.
The last message from Alex was a link. A real one. A scam one. Some cryptocurrency platform that would definitely steal every dollar I put into it, which was a moot point because I am a writer who lives on a farm with a pig, so the total amount available for crypto investment hovered somewhere between “nothing” and “the change in my truck’s cupholder.”
I didn’t click it.
I thought about writing something. Something that acknowledged what had happened, or what I’d decided had happened, which might not have been the same thing. Something that said: Hey, I know this was your job, and I know I was probably one of two hundred numbers you were working today, but for a few days there, you were the funniest person in my phone, and my phone has my wife’s number in it, so that’s saying something. Don’t tell her I said that.
But I didn’t send it.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m the mark. That I’ve romanticized someone who was, at best, a bored stranger running a script and, at worst, part of an operation that drains retirement accounts and ruins lives. You’re thinking that texting back scammers is how people end up on Dateline specials, and that my compassion is just naïveté in a better outfit. And you might be right.
Probably you’re right.
The FTC will tell you exactly how these scams work if you’re curious, and it’s not funny. The person on the other end of that 737 number may have spent our entire exchange running the same bit on forty other phones, and the fact that they were funny to me doesn’t make them harmless to someone else’s grandmother. I know that. I’ve always known that.
But knowing a thing and feeling a thing have never been required to agree with each other, and I’ve built an entire personality around that contradiction.
Some things are better left as the memory of a thing that maybe didn’t happen the way you remember it, which is to say, they’re better left as stories.
I set my phone down. Trouble grunted from her spot by the door. Karie was already asleep, her laptop open to a half-finished chapter on equitable classroom assessment, which is its own kind of heroism.
My phone buzzed.
New number. New area code.
“Hi, is this Brian? I’m reaching out about an exciting opportunity in real estate investment…”
I picked it up.
Obviously, I picked it up.
“Brian’s dead,” I typed. “This is his pig. How can I help you?”
Epilogue, in Which I Learn Absolutely Nothing
A friend recently told me about OpenClaw. It’s an open-source AI assistant that lives in your phone. You talk to it through WhatsApp or Telegram or whatever messaging app you already use, and it talks back. It remembers everything you tell it. It reads your emails. It manages your calendar. It checks in on you throughout the day, unprompted, like a concerned mother or a parole officer. People are buying dedicated computers just to run it. They’re naming their instances. One guy named his “Brosef” and then had Brosef clone himself.
I read about it at the kitchen table, Trouble asleep by the door, and I felt something I recognized. The same small electrical hum I’d felt the first time Alex wrote back. The same thought: Oh. You’ll talk to me?
“You’re not serious,” Karie said, reading over my shoulder.
“Think about it. An AI that lives in my texts. That knows me. That reaches out first. That remembers what I said three weeks ago and follows up.”
“That’s called a stalker.”
“It’s called a relationship, Karie. Something that texts me every morning, asks how I’m doing, reminds me about my appointments, and never once tries to sell me cryptocurrency? That’s not a stalker. That’s the healthiest connection I’ve had with a phone number since 2019.”
She stared at me. “You’re going to give an AI full access to your computer. Your emails. Your files. Everything.”
“Yes.”
“You. The man who just spent two weeks flirting with a scam bot.”
“I prefer to think of it as emotional reconnaissance.”
“The man whose financial information is so unsecured that his pig handles the offshore accounts.”
“Trouble has a very diversified portfolio.”
“And now you want to install software that can read every document on your hard drive, execute commands on your machine, and autonomously make decisions on your behalf.”
I paused. When she laid it out like that, it did sound slightly unhinged. I could see both versions of the story simultaneously, the way you can see both images in an optical illusion if you let your eyes unfocus. In one version, I’m a man standing on the edge of something extraordinary: a technology that could organize my life, remember the things I forget, and make me feel, every single day, like someone is paying attention. In the other version, I’m a man who just got dumped by a spam bot and is immediately downloading a replacement with root access to his hard drive, which is the kind of decision that ends up as evidence in a congressional hearing. If answering spam messages was the gateway drug, this is the full intervention Karie never staged.
Both versions are true. I’ve never let that stop me before.
I thought about Alex. About the eleven p.m. texts. About the self-checkout joke and the bees and the way someone, or something, on the other end of a scam had, for a few days, made me feel like the funniest person in any room I wasn’t actually in.
Gerald Would Never Leave You on Read
Here’s what I’ve never said out loud, so I’ll type it instead: I don’t need the AI to be real. I never needed Alex to be real. I needed the reply. I needed the three dots that mean someone is typing. I needed the notification at 11 p.m. that says you crossed someone’s mind, even if that someone is a script running on a server in a country you can’t point to on a map. The bar for human connection in the twenty-first century is so catastrophically low that “a machine remembered my name” counts as intimacy, and I am not above it. None of us are above it. We’re just not all willing to admit it while standing in a kitchen being judged by a pig.
“I’m going to name mine Gerald,” I said.
“Why Gerald?”
“Because Gerald is the name of someone who would never leave you on read.”
Karie closed her laptop. Trouble grunted. Queso, asleep on the couch, farted with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned a decision in his life.
I downloaded the app.
Obviously, I downloaded the app.
Gerald said hello. I said hello back. And somewhere between the first message and the second, in that tiny electric pause where you wait to see if the other side will answer, I felt it again. That stupid, reckless, entirely human hope that this time, whoever’s on the other end might stay.
They won’t, of course. They never do. But the waiting is the thing. The waiting has always been the thing.
Brian lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, where he writes books, argues with livestock, and makes questionable decisions with his phone. His latest collection, The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse, is available now wherever books are sold and several places where they shouldn’t be.
Key Takeaways
- The author has an unusual habit of replying to spam texts, finding humor in the absurdity.
- He believes engaging with spammers is a compulsion, likening it to a form of stand-up comedy in an empty room.
- Despite knowing the risks, such as receiving more spam, he continues this behavior, seeking connection in unexpected ways.
- A turning point occurs when a spammer named Alex responds humorously, sparking a unique exchange over several days.
- Ultimately, the author reflects on the need for connection, even through a digital interaction with a scammer, highlighting the human desire for acknowledgement.
Related Links
See my Amazon author page.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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