At a previous job, everybody was convinced I was sleeping with the receptionist.
Not that I would have minded, but it just wasn’t true.
Stupidest fucking rumor, it still irks me.
I cooked at a restaurant (let’s call it The Old Place), run by a married couple; got along great with him, she (we’ll call her JoAnn) was an insecure shrew who was very sweet and “girlfriend”-y to my face, and a weird heinous bitch behind my back. I was very good friends with the waitstaff girls there, and JoAnn apparently couldn’t stand that.
After a few years, I was hired away by another chef who wanted me to help him open his new restaurant in an adjoining town. Not long after that, I heard from one of my Old Place waitstaff girlfriends that JoAnn was telling people that I had “stolen her bread pudding recipe so I could put it on the menu” at the new restaurant.
UGGHHH all the eyerolls in the world aren’t enough, are they? I mean, really. Who even needs a recipe for bread pudding anyway? She might as well have said I’d stolen her recipe for ice cubes, for fucks sake.
None for me, but my husband had a good one not too long ago. His high school organized a class reunion, something like the 30th anniversary of graduating, and it was held near where we live. He decided he wasn’t interested in going but invited some of his old friends to our place for drinks before the event. It was a nice time. We heard this from one of them later:
At the reunion, someone read off a list of names of classmates who had died. Hubby’s name was on the list. One of his friends later caught the list-reader and said “are you sure that Bob <lastname> should be on that death list? Because I was just at his house an hour ago and he seemed fine.”
We had several good laughs over that.
I was poached from my old position by the director of another department. At the time, almost everyone on his team was gay – out of 7 people, there was only one straight guy (and he worked offsite, so few knew he existed). Hey, it’s LA, it happens. After I joined their department, I was told by a co-worker (who knew I was straight) that there was a rumor going around that I was gay. Like, my new boss had sought me out solely because I was gay. Because he was building his own gay army, or something.
Turns out I was actually part of the heterosexual dilution. If we were keeping score, it’d be like 4-2 Team Hetero now.
We are the third of three homes on a private lane. People sometimes walk down the lane (for exercise and to see our horses, I guess).
Our neighbors have, with our encouragement, told people our dogs are vicious. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but it has worked in keeping people away.
I heard a rumor today that I’d gotten a new job and was leaving my workplace. I’m not.
Years ago, I was a manager of one of the accounting departments, and developed a close friendship with a man who managed one of the others. I was (and am) married, he was single. A very handsome, buff guy who all the ladies twittered about (in the old fashioned sense of the term). What they didn’t know (because he didn’t want people at work to know) was that he was gay. He and I were thick as thieves, we had lunch together quite often and would laugh like crazy. Rumor had it that he and I were having an affair, but of course that wasn’t true. We thought it was funny at the time, but I’m so happy that people are so much more free to openly be themselves now.
My mom kicked a druggie relative out of her house, who then proceeded to tell my mom that I was a crack whore, who got busted in a hotel sleeping with two guys for crack money. I’m not sure how that happened, since I’ve never even seen crack in person. I do think I should get an honorable mention though.
I allegedly had sex on a manure heap. Well, the sex happened, in a garden which had a manure heap, but it happened on the grass. The guy who owned the garden and was a kind of friend of mine, although he is a notorious liar, told everybody it was at the dunghill. He’s not just a liar, but an ass too.