Four Guys and A Rumor

by Saafia Masoom

No, PHS, Cole Haas (‘16) is not moving to Delaware. His father isn’t having spine problems. And, nobody in the Haas family is dying.

Four boys among our student body recently learned a lot about the power of social media and rumors in very little time. It all started out as good fun, and to be honest, it ended in good fun when everyone realized what had happened.

The idea to start a rumor about Haas came to his buddies Cody Schambow (‘16), Josh Reuter (‘16), and Mitch Knockel (‘16) one day during their Algebra II class. “We were just going to start a rumor about Cole because we were mad about something,” says Schambow. That night each of them posted a picture of Haas on Instagram with a caption saying that they would miss their friend dearly when he moved to Delaware. While it was completely false and meant to last for only one night, none of them could have predicted the madness that followed.

The snapchats, tweets, and posts on social media started flooding in just minutes. “It was crazy,” says Reuter of the way everyone seemed to hear about the rumor almost instantaneously. The Haas family began receiving calls from other parents in the community, some of whom had heard that Haas’s dad was going to Delaware for medical reasons. Others thought Haas was on his deathbed. Amidst all the commotion, the boys received a call from Haas’s mother within half an hour of the original post.

Meanwhile, Haas himself was completely unaware. Says Knockel, “Cole was out hunting, and he didn’t know any of it was happening.” When he did find out, Haas took it in stride and went a step further: he decided to go along with it. “I pretty much thought it was funny. I wanted to see how it would turn out,”  he shares.

And, that’s when things began to get out of hand. With the help of a heartfelt post by a friend of theirs and Haas’s compliance, the charade went on for a solid week. By about Day 4 or 5, the school called the Haas family, having gotten the word. At that point, the boys decided it was probably best to kill the story. They spent the next days dispelling the rumor while Haas posted a disclaimer on Instagram about it. 

“I didn’t think it would escalate that quickly,” mentions Reuter. But, even with a harmless intent, the story got around to a large population of the school. 

All four boys are equipped with their social media outlets like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter, and they can attest to the fact that PHS’s rumor mill is in business. “People do talk trash on Twitter all the time,” states Schambow. 

It’s a lesson well-learned that surprisingly did not end in serious consequences unlike so many other instances of social media and rumors-gone-wrong. “If it’s in good humor like ours, it’s not bad,” points out Knockel. “It was meant in good humor, and Cole thought it was funny.” 

In any case, the student body might just be thinking twice before hitting that all-powerful “post” button.