Some of my all-time favorite lies from clients of the various businesses I’ve been in through the years:
Bar/restaurant business:
“Oh, no. I know the owner, and he lets me order alcohol even without my ID.” (I was the owner. :dubious:)
“There’s a hair/bug/piece of foreign matter in my food/drink.” (Almost always claimed after someone had consumed +90% of the food/beverage. Not saying it absolutely can’t happen or never happens, but it’s the favorite lie of con artists, I think.)
Owner of comic book/gaming shop:
“I have a mint condition Action Comics first issue. No, really, the 1938 one!”
“It’s okay if I read them. My mom’s coming in to pay for these in just a minute.”
Disc Jockey:
“Oh, yeah. You work for W___ radio? I guess you know ??? (best-known personality on the station.) Yeah, he and I were just hangin’ out last night at his house, drinking like we always do… etc.” (You mean you were hanging out with my husband? At my house? You’d think I’d have noticed, right? :smack:)
Hotel business:
(I heard this one just today, btw. Made me remember other favorite lies.) “I live in South Florida six months out of the year, and I have never, EVER seen a palmetto bug around MY house…” (Apparently, I was supposed to offer a refund to the guest because she had seen a palmetto bug - aka American cockroach - in the shrubs OUTSIDE a south Georgia hotel. Riiiight!)
What are some of the “good” lies that you hear in your business?
I think that this might be one of the most common lies in any business. That, and “I’m the owner’s child”, which is hilarious when I well know that the owner’s child happens to still be in diapers.
If you haven’t read Acts of Gord, then I urge you to click on over. Gord used to own and run a video game shop.
Reminds me of something some friends talked about when we were teenagers.
“So I go into this store, and I grab a six pack, and I went up to the counter, and the dude was all like ‘uh, can I see an ID’, and I was all like ‘I left it at home and shit’ and he was like ‘no way, man, I can’t sell it to you’, and was all ‘come on man, be cool’, and he was all ‘if you left your ID at home, you need to go home and get it before I sell you this fuckin’ brew, man’, and I was like ‘Yeah? Well fuck you! I WILL! I WILL go home! And then you’ll be sorry that you fucked with me!’ And then I walked out of there.”
“Oh, just do something cheap to get by for a few more weeks. I’m going to sell it soon.” (Followed, of course, by complaining when the cheap patch-it fix fails a year later.)
“You just replaced that last year!” (Actually, it was four years ago. Not usually a lie so much as a memory distortion.)
I sell scratch-off lottery tickets at work. This is a common lie there too. One particular guy who spends hundreds of dollars and several hours in the store a couple of times a week always, always says “I have to go do my laundry!” Then go do it, dude, stop hanging out here!
“I only had two beers” or “I only had a glass of wine.”
This said from somone with bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, and no sense of balance. Interestingly enough, though, I think true alcoholics really do have a hard time calculating how much they’ve drunk. Denial is a wonderful thing. In my drinking days, I remember taking the garbage out twice a week, filled with mostly empty fifths of vodka. If you’d had asked me how much I drank, I probably would have told you, in all honesty, “a couple of bottles a week.” It was probably closer to 8 or 9 fifths a week.
“It ran in the last issue or the one before that, I’m sure of it.”
Which is a virtual guarantee that it ran at least six issues ago, if not a year or more back. The editors were very happy when the website went up and they could send callers out to the website to search for whatever stupid-ass widget they just HAD to know about, a year after the fact, instead of digging around in the archives (i.e. broom closet) themselves.
“I am ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that _____ is my password.”
Honestly, I’m not going to laugh at you for forgetting your password. I forget passwords too. Just let me reset it so we can both get on with our days.
