Last month, the owners of a car dealership called Mike Smith Buick GMC posted a funny story on their Facebook page.
Their story was:
So a young driver stops in with an older car complaining that the iPhone dock in his vehicle isn't working and its scratching his phone...
The photo shows an iPhone being stuck into a cassette player on an older car.
The post soon went viral, getting more than 200,000 shares. Many commenters cackled with glee over the stupidity of ~teens.~
The story of the clueless youth and his experience at the car dealership soon was reported by several media outlets.
"It turns out young folk today don’t really ‘get’ the old fashioned audio system," wrote Yahoo News UK.
But it turns out the dealership was just reposting a joke from Reddit. The image came from a post by an Idaho man named Trevor Thomas earlier this year, not one of the dealership's customers.
The dealership apparently made up a fake story to go along with their post, instead of clarifying it was a joke they found somewhere else.
Thomas's post received almost 400,000 views and was reposted on some meme sites, but didn't go viral until it was repurposed by the dealership.
He was upset because his car's "docking station" for his iPhone wasn't working and it was scratching his screen.
But, Thomas wasn't the joke's originator either. That distinction belongs to his friend Kyle Delfosse. Delfosse's wife Brandi told BuzzFeed News her husband posted the picture to Instagram originally with the caption, "so that's what that's for."
Thomas said he saw Delfosse's post and decided to post the picture to Imgur to be funny. He came up with a new caption with the hopes of making the story more shareable:
I changed the caption to my brother to protect [my friend from] embarrassment and came up with the generational gap of technology where younger people might assume that it's made for an iPhone dock.
Just goes to show, don't believe everything you see on the internet.
Word to Teens! A Cassette player in an old Car is not your IPhone docking station....
Clarification: This post has been updated to clarify that Delfosse took the original photo, not Thomas.