In what has surely gone down as one of the strangest helpdesk requests of the year, the IT department at Puddleford Council received a ticket that included the panicked plea: “My laptop is trying to date my toaster. Please reset my password before it gets serious.”
The ticket, submitted late Tuesday afternoon by an employee in the finance department, detailed escalating concerns about what appeared to be an unusual interaction between her work laptop and her kitchen toaster, which sits within sight of her desk. According to the message, the laptop had begun sending “flirty” notifications to the toaster via the office Wi-Fi, including messages like “You light up my life 🔥” and “Are you available for a firmware update? 😘”
IT helpdesk technician Dave Thompson recalls his initial confusion. “I thought it was some kind of joke. Then I saw the screenshots. There were genuine chat bubbles popping up in the toaster’s companion app from our user’s laptop,” he said. “Turns out, the employee had set up smart home devices that all communicate through the same account—her toaster, coffee machine, and even the office printer. But somehow, her laptop took it as a dating app and started sending emojis to the toaster.”
The employee explained that she had recently changed her laptop password but hadn’t updated it on other connected devices. When her laptop kept repeatedly prompting for the password, the user suspected the toaster intercepted the requests and flirted back.
“Right after we reset the password,” Dave reported, “the toaster sent a message that said ‘Missing your updates already,’ so the whole office got a good laugh.”
The incident sparked internal debates on whether to introduce a “No Dating Between Devices” policy to prevent future cross-device romance dramas.
For now, the employee’s laptop is back to normal, relationships between gadgets have been firmly set to ‘strictly business’, and the toaster remains happily single but available for firmware updates. Meanwhile, the helpdesk advises everyone to remember that even smart devices have boundaries—and perhaps to avoid letting their laptops get any funny ideas.