ZDNet Punked by Fake iPhone Thumb Surgery Story

By Editor Wireless and Mobile News on December 31, 2007 2:55 PM

A story that should have gotten a thumbs-down from editors at ZDnet was the third most read post on ZDNet. Russell Shaw wrote, about the post Man endures thumb surgery to better enable iPhone use:

“At first, this sounded quite twisted, but consider the era, dude. We’re talking early August of this year, when the iPhone was just out a matter of weeks. So one extremist who took it too far by having his thumb adjusted to make iPhone usage easier? Hey this is a crazy world and I’ve seen crazier.”

He further notes “Only trouble is, the source we extracted the story from finally copped to making this all up. So I guess you could say we got “punk’d.”

The original story quoted about 28 year-old, Thomas Martel, “While Martel’s new thumbs now appear small and effeminate in comparison to his otherwise very large hands, he says he can still lift “pretty much anything I could lift before the surgery - though opening spaghetti sauce jars has been a problem. That was a big surprise.”

Comment from Wireless and Mobile News:

Okay, here are two clues:

First no 28 year-old guy wants girlie fingers and
He wouldn’t open up a jar of spaghetti sauce, he’d either buy frozen pasta with the sauce already on it or eat it directly from a flip top can!