A toddler locked his dad out of his iPad for 48 years

Kids do the darnedest things, especially when it comes to technology. Accidental in-app purchases, anyone? Fifty-nine photos of your kids’ thumb? Check and check.

So when The New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos posted about his 3-year-old son, Ollie, locking his iPad for just about the equivalent of 48 years, Twitter users related in a big way.

Here’s Osnos’ April 6 post, which went viral.

“Uh, this looks fake but, alas, it’s our iPad today after 3-year-old tried (repeatedly) to unlock. Ideas?”

After he tweeted that post, Osnos promptly forgot about it until the next day when he started to get press inquiries about it.

“On social media, I discovered that the tweet about our predicament was traveling fast, kicking up the full, raucous spectrum of Internet sensibilities,” Osnos wrote in a follow-up for The New Yorker.

“Pretty sure you could create an account to let everyone watch the countdown… for the next half century,” wrote one Twitter user.

Others shared similar experiences.

Luckily, along with a mix of both humorous comments and unsympathetic posts about keeping an iPad out of a kids’ reach or preventing children from using them at all (Osnos says his son typically gets the tablet only on plane flights), there were some helpful suggestions on how to reset the device.

By April 9, Osnos shared that he was able to get his iPad unlocked by resetting it, as seen in the tweet below.

“And the iPad was on a high shelf,” he added.

Osnos also had this positive takeaway from the iPad incident: “Favorite moment of this little affair: the people who wrote to cheer on our beloved boy’s undeniable enthusiasm for STEM.”

For those of you facing a similar situation, here are the instructions for unlocking a hopelessly locked iPad.

Have you ever had your kid put you in a tech tough spot before?