Personal case of mistaken identity

In My Humble Opinion
1

Have you ever had complete strangers approach you, so quite convinced you were someone else such that even your voice didn’t give you away and the stranger(s) persist in striking up a conversation with you about old times and such?

How did you handle it?

Did you think it was some kind of joke or truly mistaken identity?

Did you “play along” with him/them?

Did you try to convince her/them they were mistaken?

Did you get the idea you could have played the charade indefinitely if you so desired?

Other side of the same coin: have you ever tricked yourself into thinking you knew someone when you really did not and yet did not back off right away?

A few years back at my grandmother’s wake, the funeral home was set up such that four different wake rooms fed into the same ante-room. Leaving for a moment to get some fresh air, as I entered the ante-room I noticed four guys from another wake staring at me, mumbling, “Yeah, that’s him. It’s her son.” The four thuggish biker types approached me, stopping me in my tracks. One said, “You’ve put on some weight.”
“Yes, yes I have,” I replied.
“Your growing your hair out. Cool,” said another.
“Yeah, yeah I’ve been growing it for awhile.”
“How’s it going?” asked the third.
“Well, all thing considered, I guess I’m okay.”
“We’re a might surprised you showed up here,” stated the first.
“Well, she is my mother and it is her funeral.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t talked to your mother in years,” said the third.
“Well, I probably won’t be talking to her today, either. Pardon me guys while I get some fresh air.”

By the time I got back, they may have split or gone to the front of their wake because I never saw them again. Their confusion seemed genuine; I don’t believe for a second they were “putting me on.” I’ll bet when they told others at the wake that they had seen the mother’s son no one believed them. When I never returned, maybe they thought I was an angel or a ghost, who knows.

Other side: I ran into a gal this past summer at a party who had bought a car from me years ago, a new red '93 Geo Storm: automatic, a/c, rear defrost, am/fm cassette stereo, drivers side airbag. The gal had changed very little in nine years, put on a little weight, but that’s about it. Same exact caps on the same exact teeth, same exact smile, same freckles, same hair, same voice, same personality, mannerisms and gestures. Too bad I couldn’t remember her name. Except she swore it wasn’t her. I gave up but I think she denied it out of embarassment. I’m pretty sure it was her and am half-tempted to look her up in my old database I kept on all my customers, ask her friend what her name is and see if it’s not the same.

2

One time someone I knew mistook me for someone else. We had never met but we had classes together. The first day back to school, she was standing next to me and said a name, but I couldn’t even make out what she said because it was an unusual name. It was really confusing and annoying because she kept insisting I was a woman she had worked with over the summer. I kept saying “What? What are you talking about?” and she kept asking me things like, “What are you doing here?”

3

I was at a bar once, and a guy walked up to me, grabbed my crotch, planted a big one on my mouth, and then, realizing that I was not who he thought I was (the kick to the 'nads might have been his first clue), apologized profusely. He led me to the other side of the room and, lo and behold! There stood my double. We just sort of stared at each other for a few minutes. It was the freakiest thing I’ve ever experienced. SHE LOOKED JUST LIKE ME! I’ll never get over that!

4

I have been mistaken for Prince Edward several times - our appearances have diverged somewhat in recent years though; My hairline is receding slowly; his is now gone.

There was also an incident where somebody was mistaken for me; I bumped into an old friend that I now only see occasionally and he said he’d seen me at ‘CreamFields’ (which was a huge open air dance/rave, but at the time I had honestly never heard of it) - Naturally I was confused, and it became clear that he seemed to think that I was just denying it for some sort of bizarre moral reasons or something (he said something like “It’s OK, I won’t tell anyone…”) - he phoned me later the same day and continued to insist that I’d been there (I still hadn’t found out what ‘CreamFields’ was at this stage and the conversation was so weird that I was convinced he was on the verge of some sort of mental breakdown). We laugh about it now.

5

Once upon a time in France, a lady stopped me in the street, and asked to take my picture. It was clear that she thought I was someone else. She said the picture was for her daughters. I didn’t catch what she said first of all - she didn’t speak very good French. I think she was German, and unluckily I’d forgotten all my German at this point. Plus I was too caught-off-kilter to ask her exactly who she thought I was. Perhaps there was a German celeb who looked like me when I was skinny.

6

I’ve been mistaken for the same person twice within a couple of months.

The first time I was waiting for a taxi and when it turned up the driver took one look at me and locked his doors. After remonstrating with him for a minute or two he relented. It turned out that I looked like a neighbour of his who wasn’t exactly the nicest person in the world, always in trouble with the police and so on.

So a couple of months later, after finishing work one day, I was waiting for a bus when a car pulled over and two plain-clothes police officers got out. They came over to me, showed me their warrant cards, told me that I (other fella’s name) was under arrest and started to try and get me in the police car. My workmates intervened and eventually convinced them that I wasn’t they guy they were after.

7

I’ve also been mistaken for the same person more than once. In the same bar a few years apart. I was able to convince the first person that I was not “Sue.” The second time it happened this older man refused to believe I wasn’t “Sue,” kept insisting that I was and kept bringing these things up from Sue’s past that were very creepy sounding. I was scared and my friend and I left the bar.

A couple of years later I went with my sister to visit one of her friends in a town a few hours away from here. Neither my sister or her friend are from the town I live in. It turned out that “Sue” was a friend of my sister’s friend and I got to meet her. As far as I’m concerned there was only a passing resemblance and I’m much taller than she is.

8

I do it on the phone sometimes, whenever I get a wrong number.

But I’ll only do it if the caller jumps right in without letting me get a word in edgewise, like:

[ring]

Me: Hello?

Caller: Hey, Mike! [ my name’s not Mike ] Say, I gotta cancel our meeting tonight, I gotta go pick someone up at the airport … yadda yadda yadda.

Me: O.K. That’s no big deal. How about tommorrow, then? Same time, same place?

(What can I say … I’m evil!)

Oh, and this is what I always do when someone approcahes me in person, begins talking to me, then realizes I’m not the person he/she thinks I am.

Usually, the embarassed person stammers something like “Oh, excuse me, I thought you were somebody else.”

So I reply: “I am.”

Spiff

9

One day when i was about 15 I was at a friends football game in a town about 50 miles from where I was raised. The entire game people kept coming up to me and saying, " Hi Holly."

Being adopted, naturally I thought I had some seperated at birth sister running amok. Alas…

10

I’ve determined that I have a rather “generic” face. Many times people either (a)think they’ve met me before, when I know they couldn’t have (b)think I’m someone else, even following me down the street, calling me by someone else’s name or ©think that they saw me in a location hundreds or even thousands of miles from where I was at the time.

It happens to my dad, too. One time he was at a bar with my stepmother. While she was in the restroom, some other woman came and hugged him from behind. He turned around, surprised, but she was even more so. She said “Oh, you’re not my husband!”

11

My grampa used to go to random people and pretend he was a friend from way back for fun.

12

At a store once, this girl mistook me for someone else. I don’t remember who I was supposed to be, but I must have been a dead ringer for him because this girl would not believe me when I insisted that I wasn’t him. Eventually I just kinda walked away from her. It was rude of me, but I had never been mistaken for someone else before and I was a little wierded out. In retrospect, maybe I should have played along, because she was pretty cute :slight_smile:

13

I’m like easy e, I must have that face that everyone pictures when they think of a generic person, because I’m always getting people who would swear up one side and down the other that they’ve seen me before. Never mind that until that day, I nor anyone in my family had been within 20 miles (or in one case 2,000 miles!) of that location. (Both my Mom and my Sister have the same problem.)

Usually the really confused look on our faces lets people know that they’ve made a mistake right away.

<< Bee-bop-a-lu-la. >>

14

I get stopped all the time by people who think I’m Ethan Hawke. I will admit that I do look like him. Almost every day, someone will gawk at me an whisper to their friends. It makes me uncomfortable when people stare at me though. But I guess that’s the price I pay for being a star. LOL

15

One of my friends has a suitemate that he jokes around with and beats up on a lot, in the joking male we’re-friends-so-I-will-tackle-you-now kinda way… well, there was a new freshman this year that looked almost exactly like his suitemate, down to the facial hair and everything, and he ran up behind this guy one day and put him in a headlock. The guy was thoroughly confused and freaked out. When my friend let him go and got a better look at his face, he just blinked, went “Ahhh!” and ran away… but that’s just his style.

16

One time a few years ago I was eating dinner with a girl I was dating at the time. She noticed before I did that there was another table of 4 or 5 girls that kept staring at me, giggling and pointing. We both heard one of them say “Do you REALLY think it’s him? What would he be doing here???”. I ignored it for quite a while, although they were getting pretty obvious about it. When the waitress went to their table all the girls asked her if she thought I was “blah blah” (we never did figure out who they thought I was), and whether she could find out for them somehow. The girl said she wasn’t going to bother me or anything. When we got done and started to leave they all came over, en masse, realizing that this was their “last chance”, and asked me to sign stuff for them. I was totally blown away by it, they acted like I was some big movie star or something. I just played along with it, signed whatever they had with a totally unrecognizable scribble, and girlfriend and I went on our way. It was months before I stopped hearing about that one from her!