Look, none of us is above pettiness, especially when it comes to family arguments.
But one man’s sisters took things to a whole new level, as he revealed in a radio call-in.
The brother, named Callum, told New Zealand’s ZM show that his siblings once convinced his parents he was dead.
And his poor mum and dad only learned the truth when he called them for a catch-up... six months later.
Hosts Carl Fletcher, Vaughan Smith and Hayley Sproull listened to the story with dropped jaws, branding it the “best” they’d ever heard.
The trio were quick to probe Callum on the details of the crazy deception, and he duly obliged.
"My sisters were in a bit of a tiff with my parents at the time and they weren't really getting along,” he explained.
"I was living in Wellington while they were in Christchurch. And my older sister actually called my parents up and told them that I’d died."
His sisters then apparently claimed that the funeral had already taken place and their parents hadn’t been invited because his ex-girlfriend’s mum and dad “didn’t want them there”.
(Makes sense.)
At this point, a stunned Smith interjected: ”I'm going to say this, and in the nicest possible way – your sister sounds like a crazy b**h.
"No offence. Your sister sounds like a top-level, red flag, crazy b***h!"
@fvhzmCallum wins the award for the greatest sentence ever said on-air in ZM history ?
The hosts then posed the million-dollar question: how had Callum not spoken to his parents for half a year?
He responded matter-of-factly: "I was just busy with life and work and then I was like, wait, I haven't heard from my parents in a while. I wonder what's going on?”
He then revealed that he “gave them a call up” and, shocked, they responded: “You're alive?”
Asked how they reacted upon hearing the voice of their presumed late son, Callum admitted they were “beside themselves”.
“My mum was absolutely in tears and my dad was kind of just gobsmacked – he was just like 'what the f**k is going on?'” he recounted.
But, he later said that they were “over the moon” when he went down to visit them that same weekend to “reassure them” that he was, indeed, alive.
Naturally, the presenters asked how it was possible that his parents just accepted the news of his death without trying to verify it.
"They were kind of like just running around, calling up all our other family – seeing if they had heard anything, from what I was told," he explained.
"And then they didn't really know anything to go off so my parents kind of just presumed 'yeah he died'."
The presenters then debated whether you would call someone up if you’d heard they’d died.
“If somebody said that your friend is dead, you’re not going to pick up the phone and call them, are you? You’re just going to be like, oh, well, yeah, they’re dead,” Fletcher said.
But Smith insisted that he would get drunk and call their voicemail just to hear their voice.
After the personal reflections, the hosts asked Callum how he’d “died” according to his sisters – whether it had been a car accident or some other unfortunate event.
But no, they apparently told his parents that he’d been stabbed.
"Wait wait wait. So you are murdered?” Smith laughed delightedly.
"You're not dead by your own hand or dead in an accident, someone murdered you?”
He then asked Callum if he was “the sort of person who would have been stabbed?", to which he replied: "I was not in some gangs but I will say, at the point in time, it wouldn't have been unpeculiar for me to get stabbed."
The caller went on to insist that he didn’t know why his sisters “hate” him, and he also revealed that his parents no longer speak to them.
“We've nearly been doing this for 20 years,” Smith said. “This is the wildest phone call I've ever had.”
ZM Radio shared the excerpt from the episode to TikTok and it racked up more than 1.5 million views and 167,000 likes in a week.
However, the plot thickened when a commentator claiming to be Callum’s sister wrote: “I can confirm I never told my parents he was dead.”
She said there had been a stabbing in the city of Porirua at the time, and no one had heard from Callum “for a few months” and so she contacted him to check he was ok.
And when she found out he was, “she was happy”.
She then suggested her family had a number of issues and that she “tried to stay away” from them.
Urged to call into the radio show and “get this straightened out”, she replied: “Is it really even worth it? In order to do that I would need to air everyone's dirty laundry. It would turn from comical to sad very quickly.”
Besides, she said, she didn’t really “mind” his on-air account, conceding: “The story was a good laugh.”
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