Do any of you have amusing stories about being confused with someone else…perhaps someone famous?
A friend of mine is named Bryan Adams, and before he made his phone number unlisted, he’d get very occasional calls from agents or actresses wanting to contact the Canadian rock star of the same name.
(My own stories are more boring. I used to get calls from people looking for the realtor in my city with the same name as mine.
There is an Eastern Canadian religious journalist with the same name as mine, and he wrote me saying that he used to get compliments for the articles that I wrote, from people assuming that he was freelancing.)
My father once got a sudden rush of sympathetic “Are you all right” calls. He found out the next day that a man in a nearby town who had the same name had been beaten up enough to require hospitalization.
What makes this amusing is that Dad is the only man I’ve ever met with his name–it’s pretty uncommon.
I, on the other hand, get mixed up with other people routinely. LSU tried to give me several other guys’ diplomas first when I graduated–all of them had the same first and last names and middle initial; one actually had the same middle name. I can’t check into a hotel without getting the “That’s an alias if I ever heard one” look from the clerk.
No, my name isn’t John Smith, but it’s damn close.
On a family trip to Buffalo, NY from Northern Maine, we were traveling through Canada. We pulled up to the border and were met with a young customs agent staring at my father like he had an arm growing out of his forehead. We were asked to please pull over to the side and wait for a supervisor, without being told why. The supervisor came out, escorted by a cop or guard or something (read - armed person). They took us all inside and separated us.
Long story short, our license plate number was the same as a wanted felon’s, but different state. We were told that the cursory scan didn’t check for which state a plate was from, just the number. So that was the cause of the red flag. After it was cleared up, they apologized and sent us on our way. My father was a little miffed, but I thought (as a 10 year old) it was kind of cool being held as a dangerous criminal for 5 minutes.
Well, if Jack Batty’s story counts, this should too: Long ago, in high school, while visiting my GF in her home town, found myself in the odd situation of needing to drive her car back to the house (she felt ill). Add the following ingredients: unfamiliar car, floorboard-mounted dimmer switch, unfamiliar road at night, and blue-balled me (1 ill GF = 0 nookie), and you get a car weaving a little bit on the road and failing to dim its lights for oncoming traffic.
Natch, the nice gentleman with the Dudley-Do-Right hat and the blinking light on the top of his car wanted to check to see if I’d been drinking, so he pulled me over. He was visibly embarassed after talking to me for 15 seconds proved that I was sober as an undertaker. He suggested that I try to stick to roads I knew better. We laughed for hours. GF felt better. Kneady got lucky.
More in line with the OP:
A fellow student in one of my grad school classes admitted during the last class that she had been nervous in the classroom with me because I was the spitting image of a guy who had stalked her for some time.
My mother was once in a bar/resturant, and a passing waitress dumped a drink right on her head, with a curt “Sorry!” My mother mopped off as best she could, smiled at the waitress and said that these things happen, and not to worry about it.
Ten minutes later, the waitress passed by again, and this time the drink landed in my mother’s lap. Irritated, my mother accepted the curt apology, and went back to talking with her friends.
But when the waitress dumped a third drink on her, my mother sought out the manager, and said that three accidents in a thirty minute period seemed a bit much to her, a statement to which the manager agreed. He called over the waitress, and it came out that the waitress had thought she recognised my mother as the woman who had just broken up her best friend’s marriage. The manager didn’t find it quite as amusing as my mother, and summarily fired the waitress on the spot.
A guy with the same name as my brother died in a boating accident in Greenville, SC about a year ago. Pretty creepy to read about it in the paper. . . .
