Unbelievable Truths

In My Humble Opinion
1

I thought about an old friend today and how most people would think I was making up stories if I told them certain things about her.

Do you have true stories that are so cliché or resemble bad sitcoms a little too much? Are the story lines just a little bit too predictable for most people to believe?

Let’s hear them. Remember, no embellishing and no “heard it from a friend of a friend”. You can change names and places but nothing else.

Here’s mine:

Gina’s life began as a cliché. Her biological mother wrapped her in a blanket and left her on a doorstep. She never knew her real date of birth, where she was born, or anything about her real family.

She moved down the street when we were in junior high school and we became good friends. There was a group of us that were inseparable and she fit right in.

Around 10th grade we started smoking pot - A LOT. One rainy night Gina and I decided to drive down “cow road” (we lived out in the sticks) and smoke a bowl. There the two of us were, sitting in a daze, cruising down the road at about 40 mph, when “BAMM!” I am thrown onto the floor, Gina falls on top of me, and the stinky water from the bong pours all over the two of us. The car is no longer moving.

WTF!!!

The two of us climb back into our seats, laughing our asses off, and wondering why the seat is leaning at such a weird angle. We finally put two and two together and figure out the front right tire has fallen off. Still laughing uncontrollably, we try to figure out what we should do. It is dark and the rain is just pouring down. I ask, “where’s the tire? Do you see it out there?” Which of course puts us into additional pot induced fits of laughter.

Then, and this is the part I am always afraid people won’t believe, . . . . and then we see some headlights coming up from behind. They slowly pass us, then we see the red tail lights pop up into the air, the brake lights come on and it stops.

“Whooooooooooa Gina, I think that car ran over your tire.” We laugh harder.

We look up and there is a big cop with a very pissed off look on his face, rain rolling down his head and into his big cop mustache, wheeling the tire back to Gina’s car. This makes us laugh even harder! He knocks on the driver side window, Gina’s opens the widow causing a big wiff of pot and bong water to hit him in the face, then he asks “Did you girls lose something?” For some reason, we find this very funny.

By now we are laughing so hard we are holding our crotches so we don’t pee our pants.

He drove us back to Gina’s, walked us to the door so he could tell her dad to fix the tire, turned and fell ass first off the porch into a huge bush getting stuck with his feet in the air. OMG it was funny, especially the “aaaaaahhhhhhh” sound he made when he first started falling.

The two of us ran to the bathroom - Gina didn’t quite make it. :slight_smile:

Her dad stayed to pull the cop out.

2

More Gina stuff.

Gina was a total shit child. She forged her dad’s checks in the amount of over $3000.00 in less than 2 weeks. The day she got busted, she had a huge bag of pot in her purse (as you can see we were pots heads back then. Now, I’m such a lightweight I get wasted from aspirin). On the way to Moweda (kid jail), she tells this very cute cop “Just so you know, I have an ounce of pot in my purse.” He asks her if it is any good and she replies “I wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t”. He takes the pot from her and it is never mentioned again.

To make a long story shorter, she continues to get into trouble. Once she turns 18 years old she isn’t able to spend time in her second home - Moweda but instead went to prison for 2 years for forgery, bad checks, and credit card theft.

Over the next 7 or 8 years while the rest of us grew up and got responsible, she just bounced in and out of jail or prison (even escaped once while on work-release). FINALLY, she gets her shit together, gets clean, graduates college, gets a great job and grows up. Along the way, she has discovered that she is bisexual and has fallen in love with a women whose name is also Gina. This new Gina is very masculine where my friend Gina is really girly, because of this, they went by the name Mr. and Mrs. Gina. Kind of amusing, but nothing too strange. They were together for almost 8 years.

Mrs. Gina attends a family reunion (Mr. Gina had to work). At this reunion, she meets a male cousin who is only 19 years old (Gina is around 34 at the time). They begin e-mail and telephone contact and eventually Gina packs up, leaves Mr. Gina and is now living with her young cousin, raising their two babies — in Arkansas — near the Ozarks.

I swear.

3

This is a little bit secondhand, in that I wasn’t there, but I know the star of this story well.

When my old roommate ex-lover, and dear friend Mark was an freshman at Yale, he made the mistake of dating two different girls at the same time without telling either of them about the other. Somehow they ran into each other and figured this out. They were mad. Together they went to his room to confront him. He wasn’t there, so they waited.

Somehow they decided it would be better if they both took their tops off.

So Mark, unsuspecting, walks into his room to find the two girls he is dating sitting on his bed. Topless. And then they attack him. Still topless. He ended up with a scratched face and a black eye. He said it was the most bizarre and surreal and macabre thing he’d ever been through.

When he was a senior, he was at a rugby party and someone brought up the legend of “That guy who a coupla years ago got beat up by two topless girls.” The speaker didn’t realize that it really happened and that the “victim” was right there in the room. He had apparently become a bit of campus lore.

4

Once very long ago I was moving out of my apartment. In the process of packing I was putting odds and ends on the kitchen counter. At one point I had the following items up there (among other things): halloween hockey mask (i.e. not a real one), machete, Burger King ketchup packets. I noticed out the window that my then girlfriend was pulling into the parking lot. Quickly I donned the hockey mask and smeared the ketchup over the machete and my shirt, then waited by the door. As soon as I heard footsteps by the door I whipped it open and yelled “What the hell do you want?!”

Only it wasn’t my girlfriend, it was the mailman. If you can picture George Costanza w/o glasses in a mailman uniform high-pitch screaming like a little girl (remember the Simpsons episode where Ned Flanders screamed like a girl?), that is what I saw. Then he passed out. Just crumpled to the ground in a heap.

So just as I lean forward to see if he is Ok, that is when my gf comes up the stairs and sees me in a halloween mask, holding a ketchup coated machete over the lifeless body of a mail carrier. After she blurts out “OH…MY…GOD” do I realize how stupid I must look. Only I can ruin a practical joke so horribly.

The mailman came to in about 2 minutes, looking disoriented and suspicious but unharmed. Gf called me an immature jackass and we broke up days later. Looking back on that day I still can’t believe the timing of the events, they worked out so perfectly that if I hadn’t been there than I would have to insist they were fake.

5

xizor Thank you for a much needed full body laugh. [/hijack]

Abby

6

xizor, I have to also add that I laughed so hard I started crying when I read your story. That’s happened a few times on these boards, but not so often that it’s not worth another hijack to admit it.

7

I can’t believe she broke up with you! Hell, I would have proposed right there on the spot! :smiley:

8

Some years ago I had a housemate who went to a party, met a girl he liked, and decided to impress her by… pretending to be a brain surgeon. The rest of us living in the house were roped in, on occasion, to help him maintain this “deception”. (I use the inverted commas there because none of us believe she fell for it.) He would, for example, borrow my classical music tapes to provide an appropriately intellectual and cultured background for his attempts at seduction. When she asked him for details, he would either claim that he didn’t talk about these things outside working hours, or he would try to make something up, with varying levels of success (from “none” to “slight”).

No, it didn’t work. (Did you really need to ask?)

To this day, I don’t know what he thought he was doing… apart from the obvious problems of founding a relationship on a (very implausible) lie, he could have told her he was doing a postgraduate course in optoelectronics, and that would have impressed her just as much as brain surgery, and it would have had the additional merit of actually being true.

9

Briefly, because I’m supposed to be working.

One cold, snowy day when I was 18, I was about to merge on a highway when my car spins out… into the path of an 18-wheeler.
Bam!
My car is a crumpled wreck, I get out, turn off the stereo, lock the doors, and ask the driver of the big rig if he’s okay. I don’t have a scratch on me.

7 years later, my sister is 18, and driving down the highway on a cold, snowy day, when an 18-wheeler suddenly jacknifes in front of her.
Bam!
Her car is a crumpled wreck, she gets out, locks the doors, and asks the driver of the rig if he’s okay. She doesn’t have a scratch on her.

Guess I come from a tough family :wink:

10

Well, here’s another one that sounds like a bad movie.

8-9 years ago, I’d just been dumped by–well, as it turns out, my friend Mark from the story above. We have all the same friends and I’m suffocating in misery seeing him all the time, so I decide I’m going to meet people through the personals. I only find one ad that seems worth responding to. I write the letter to the drop box, and a few weeks later he calls. We meet for lunch. He seems okay, though I’m not knocked off my feet–but I figure, hey, it takes a while to get someone before you can write them off. So he says he’ll give me a call and then I never hear from the rat bastard again. I was really insulted–imagine having someone think after one lunch they don’t want to ever meet you again. Creep. I swear off personal ads as a dumb way to meet anyone.

Okay. It’s about 4 years later. My roommate (as it happens, also named Mark, but a different guy) has just had tremendous success meeting some people with the same travel interest as he does, via the personal ads in the same monthly rag I’d used. I start reading the male ads with him to help him figure how to word his next one. I see one that catches my eye and I decide what the hell, maybe I’ll try again. I carry the letter around for 3 weeks before finally mailing it. The guy calls. We have an awkward getting-to-know-you-via-phone conersation. He tells me what he does for a living. I say, “Oh no. Oh no. Do you have dark curly hair and play a lot of chess?” Yes folks, that’s right. it’s the same guy. I answer two personal ads in my life in this city of 100,000 people, and it’s him both times?!?!

I ended up marrying him. This is a dandy story, but both Mr. Cranky and I are so humiliated at having used personal ads to meet that we tell almost no one.

11

Dunno if this fits in precisely with the theme of the thread, but, WTF, it’s short.

About fifteen years ago, a bunch of us programmers were working at or for the same company (some of us were staff, some were contractors). One of us, Mike (his real name; he moved down South years ago, and even if he reads this, he probably won’t come back here merely for the pleasure of beating me to a jelly) had been taking piano lessons. On a certain day, he decided that his lessons had finally reached their culmination; he had now learned to play the piano. “I’ve learned to play the piano”, he informed us. Since Mike was about six-foot-five, our public reaction was generally to agree with anything he told us.

On that very night, we went to a local club to drink, dance, and/or pick up women. The singer with the band that was playing was Angela (not her real name; she didn’t move down South; in fact, she lives about half an hour from where I’m sitting now), whom I knew somewhat (not a coincidence; I’d picked the club). During a break, she came over to our table. Mike, whether to impress her as a fellow musician or to try and pick her up, announced to her, “I’ve reached an important milestone in my life…” Angela immediately threw her arms around him and, in a voice that probably couldn’t have been heard very far outside the club, squealed, “Oh, Mike, you’ve finally lost your virginity!”

All of us thought that this was very funny, except for Mike.

12

Xizor, I’m going to be chuckling about that tale all day.

13

My dope brother fell off a friends rooftop terrace railing and broke his arm. A year later I fell of the same rooftop terrace railing and broke my arm.

14

My wife is a psych professor.

One class, she did an exercise to teach about cues liars
give off (refusal to make eye contact, etc.).

So she told the class my life story - that I was born in
Alabama, my father died before I was born, my mother died
when I was six, and I was raised by a cousin and her
husband.

And nobody believed her. Not because of any cues
or anything, but simply because that life was too
melodramatic - it couldn’t have happened to anybody.

Maybe that doesn’t fi in with the OP, but then
again, maybe it does.

15

xizor
That is the funniest story I have ever read on SDMB! Thank you for the laugh!

16

A. Xizor, that was hilarious.

  1. Cranky, what reason did he give for not calling you again the first time around? I’m on the edge of my seat here.

My story is not so interesting. When I was a teenager, my best friend decided she wanted to see a psychic, and talked me into going with her. I’m really very proud of being a skeptic, and I don’t believe in psychics, but I did cave and go along with my friend. The psychic was a very nice lady, but even after our visit, I still didn’t believe in psychic abilities.

A few years later, though, I was reading the paper and saw that she won the state lottery.

If I was going to start believing in the powers of psychics, this would probably be a good place to start.

17

I just remembered another one that might fit:
when I was going to school in Raleigh in the late 80s, I worked at a restaurant (Shoneys) right in front of Kmart. One sunday night I called in sick (I actually had a date). That night about midnight, about the time I would have been closing the restaurant, a tornado came through and wiped out the Kmart. The restaurant was severly damaged and all the cars in the parking lot were totalled.

Afterwards of course I walked around telling people I was psychic and knew that was going to happen and that is why I called in sick.

18

He claims he can’t remember. For the first 3 years or so of our courtship/marriage, I used to bring it up all the time. Bring it up or hit him over the head with it; whatever you want to call it. I suspect someone else who replied to that ad had a nicer rack.

I was ambivalent about meeting the second time once I realized what had happened. I said (with only a trace of bitterness) “You met me before, and didn’t think it’d work out, so if ya want to skip it that’s fine with me.”

He, being more adventuruous, more trusting in fate, or maybe just desperate, said no, we oughtta meet again, why not.

19

I swear this is a true story (who could make it up?)

One day in a shopping mall my sister & I were swapping New York City jokes. I said "Of course, that’s the classic one about the first time a tourist goes to New York, walks up to a native and says “Can you tell me where the Empire State Building is, or should I just go fuck myself?” We get on the escaltor, me first, and my sister asks “Or should I WHAT?” I turn around, say “or should I go fuck myself” and then realize I am talking to a middle aged woman who got on the escaltor between my sister and me and who I never saw before in my life!

I immediately face front, cover my mouth to not burst out laughing, and let out a snort a pig would envy. Behind me, my sister says “Oh, shit.” I get off the escaltor, step to one side, the lady gets off and moves on in a daze, my sister and I look at each other and end up ROTFLOAO! Best set-up of my sister’s life.

20

My story isn’t funny, but it is true. It’s also an example of some of the worst human behaviour I’ve been a first-hand witness to.
I’m working at a temp assignment at a very large company. I work with two guys, Fred and Barney. Barney’s wife gets a job with the company, too, in a different department. Fred and Wilma and Barney and Betty start hanging out together, as they have three kids and one kid respectively, live in the same neighbourhood, and really get along great.

This is fine for a couple of months, then at Christmas, I’m joking around with Barney about how he’s been married thirteen years, so he knows everything about relationships, and he very quietly says that he and his wife are separated now (picture me with my large foot jammed squarely in my mouth - Barney is a great guy, and I would never have intentionally said anything to hurt him.) A few days later, we all find out through the grapevine that Betty has left Barney and their three kids to be with Fred. Fred has left Wilma and Pebbles to be with Betty. I worked with both Fred and Barney; I thought they were both great guys, and I was completely shocked (and disappointed) by what Fred did.

I can’t figure out which is the best part; the part where Fred and Barney still have to work together, or the part where Betty walks away from her three kids and forgets about being a mother to them and runs away with Fred, who has also left Pebbles behind (and Wilma has just miscarried their second baby), or the part where Betty says she left her marriage and three kids because she was bored. The only good thing that came out of this was that the company promoted Barney away from Fred, and cul-de-sacked Fred (he got sent back to a remote office, and I suspect his career is pretty much dead-ended there.) Bleah. Humans suck sometimes.