Maybe I don't h8 text messaging after all

Sometimes the best pranks are the ones that happen by accident...

The 23-Year-Old, a recurring character on this blog, is a real person. She works for the Tampa Bay Lightning and sometimes she is extremely gullible. This was an unfortunate combination of circumstances for her Tuesday night.

She is currently in Dallas, attending meetings with representatives from other NHL clubs.

The Lightning have two players, Vaclav Prospal (pictured) and Chris Gratton, who have been with the team three different times.

I was watching the game Tuesday night and when the Lightning fell behind 3-0, I got bored and started sending the following text messages to her, about five minutes apart:

"We just traded prospal"

"We just got prospal back in a trade"

"Oops, he's been traded again"

"We got gratton back, who we traded earlier tonight"

"We just traded gratton again"

"We just got gratton and prospal back, in exchange for brad lukowich {a player who had been with the Lightning on two different occassions}"

"We got lukowich in the second prospal trade tonight"

"Or was it gratton?"

"Gratton and prospal have each been traded 5 times tonight"

"Oops, make it 6...nope, 7. They both just got traded again"

Finally, she replied, but apparently after reading only the first message (but I didn't know that at the time): "What??? Prospal went where???"

I don't know why, but I answered: "Pittsburgh"

It turns out that at that very moment she was having dinner with people from the meetings, including two employees from the Pittsburgh Penguins. Now, she knew there was a game going on. And she knows that it's highly unlikely that any player would be traded in the middle of a game. And if she had read the other text messages, she probably would have figured out it was a joke. She isn't stupid. However, instead she chose to be ESPN and broke the story of the trade to her dinner companions who immediately got on their phones, making frantic calls back to the home office to see what the hell was going on. While they were doing that, she took the opportunity to look at the rest of her messages. This resulted in her texting "I hate you all the team reps are at my table...And they are like wtf". This made me laugh. Then she texted "I am so mad at you". This made me double over in hysterics. When she texted "Omg I am so mad I hate you", I nearly went into convulsions. I was in tears and everything.

I apologized and promised to buy her something expensive when she comes back (which I won't do), and she recognized the situation for what it was (mostly her fault) so she isn't mad at me any more. But man, that was some good times!