When I was in college people said that I vandalized my roomates car. I didn’t. At all. She was one of those roomates who mostly lived with her boyfriend. Now, I will say I poured a bucket of bleachy water on some guy’s car a year or so before that, but I did have a reason to be pissed at him (sort of). I had nothing against the roomate and certainly wouldn’t have done what was done to this girl’s car. Even the Dean of Students believed it was true but nobody ever had the balls to confront me.
Someone apparently spread a story that, after attending a dinner at a friend’s house, I took off my shoes and socks and started biting my nails.
My toenails.
I have no idea how this started, or why. Practuically speaking, I don’t think I’m flexible enough to do it.
I was really surprised that I heard this story from a prospective employer (whom I didn’t know), and I still have no idea how he got the story. It really pisses me off that this ridiculous story may actually have cost me a job.
I don’t remember. Either I was that lame, the rumor was that lame or a disappointment of both. I don’t remember much of schooling anyways, it’s sealed in the mental lockbox and dredges itself up at the most inopportune moments.
Either I’ve never had a bad rumor spread about me (I got bullied quite a bit, but I don’t recall any real rumours going around) or it’s in that section of my brain pertaining to the three years of Hell I endured in elementary school, which I try to use as little as possible.
Not too long ago, another school-mom spread a rumor that I was a drunk. This is marginally funny, because I am well-known among my peers for my aversion to alcoholic beverages (no major “issues”, I just don’t drink alcohol. Ever.) However, I was very very involved in school district issues at the time, and there was sufficient belief in the rumor that it tainted things considerably.
Interestingly, the mom who spread the rumor? She’s in rehab for alcoholism now. And her daughter, who is the same age as MY daughter, has recently started a rumor that my daughter is gay. I’m thinking the apple doesn’t fall far…
I was generally disliked for most of my school years. I had ADD from the get-go… as a child I was very hyperactive, show-offy and…well… “chatty”. When I got around all those other kids at school, it was like I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted so much for everyone to like me… this was elementary school. Grade One.
I wasn’t rough or bouncing off the walls exactly, I was just very excitable and talkative. I can’t stress talkative enough… kids didn’t seem to like that much.
As we entered juniour high, I was put in the enrichment program. Suddenly I had enemies. I didn’t know why, but the “popular girls” hated me. I started getting beat up. Daily. I learned pretty quickly to just drop early in the fight and let them get their kicks in and they’d go away. I had awful shit left in my locker, like garbage and people’s moldy lunches, or sticky, chewed gum under the handle so I’d grab it… yuck. These people were nasty.
After a while, it seemed like everything I did was scrutinised by everyone. If I wore a certain shirt, they’d whisper behind my back that it was so I could impress some boy I didn’t even know existed (but since they thought he was cute, the whole world must want him). If I gave anyone a dirty look because they shouted a name at me, I was a witch, giving the “evil eye”. I’ve been an insomniac all my life, and so often showed up at school and immediately fell asleep through most of my classes - as most of you already seem to know, they believed that it was because I was stoned. My nickname was “Stoner”. How I loathed these people.
I eventually had friends… the only friends I could possibly make in a situation like mine - others who were also repressed in some way: two gay guys and a lesbian. They were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life, and they still are today, almost ten years after graduating. The girl I haven’t spoken to in a little over five years, but if she called me up tomorrow and said “look, I need you to take a bullet for me” there would be no questions, I’d do it. Give me the time and place.
A bad rumour that had teachers taking me aside was that I was taking speed to study and ace all my tests and exams. You see, I had a philosophy in highschool, which I pretty much kick myself in the ass for today, but I didn’t “believe in” homework. I figured if you couldn’t teach me what I needed to know in the time alotted, you weren’t worth my time. When school was out, that was my time, to do as I pleased. The sad part is, homework, in many classes, made up a large percentage of our final mark. So, people thought I was dumb. Until someone saw a handful of my test and exams, piled on my enrichment teacher’s desk from all my other “regular” classes: Every single one of them had 100% written on them. You see, my memory is not quite what I’d call photographic, but I can retain quite a bit. I didn’t just not like to do homework, I also *didn’t need to do it * to understand the subject. Well, this girl went and told everyone that I took speed so I would get those perfect scores. I was sent down to the guidance counsellers, where I’d sleep on their waiting chairs, and then get called in to ask if I had a drug problem, I could tell them, I’d be safe, etc.
The thing is, all that crap started in high school, and because I’m from a small town, it continued into the “real world”. Whispers of “I heard she was a…” “Yes, I heard that, too!” followed me wherever I went.
A couple years ago, shortly before I moved out here, one of my worst highschool enemies came into a restaurant where I was having lunch with an aquaintance. She was friends with my aquaintance, and she sat down at the table with us and began talking excitedly about how she’d just started smoking pot in the past month, and how great she thought it was and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t ever tried it before. She turns and looks at me, and says, “Well, YOU know exactly what I mean, don’t you? Isn’t it great?” I shook my head slowly.
Her: “What are you talking about? You were the biggest stoner in high school, everyone knows that! You don’t have to lie to me.”
Me: “That’s untrue. I never did any drugs.”
Her: “But your nickname was Stoner, why would people say that?”
Me: “You tell me. I never did drugs of any sort.”
Her: “Well. Everyone thinks you did and still do.” (no shit, Sherlock).
Me: “It doesn’t make it true.”
Her: “You know, I never understood why you got to be in the enrichment classes anyway.” (wth did this come from?)
Me: “They told me to go, so I went.”
Her: “It should have been someone like me. I was prettier and more popular, and I was much smarter than you. I even went to college.”
Me: “And you’re much more tactful than anyone I know.”
Her: “Well… yes. Duh!”
Me: “Didn’t you drop out of college to party?”
Her: “I did because I didn’t need it… I AM tactful! I don’t care what you say!” (delayed reaction, there, huh?)
Me: “shrug If you say so.”
Her: “Look, you were never very smart, everyone knows that. You’ll never be anything. You’ll never even leave this town, you’ll stay here forever!”
Me: “… you seem to keep coming back, it must not be too bad.”
Her: “I have my plans. People like you will just be jealous of people like me.”
Me: “Who are you trying to convince? Me, or you?”
Her: “…Are you *coming on * to me?”
Seriously folks, this is what I’ve had to deal with.
:smack: :rolleyes: 
Until now. I’ve moved to Seattle, married rich, and just work on my painting and writing all day. No, I can’t say I’ve “become anyone” at this time, I’m just a happy little housewife, doing what I love to do. The only thing I’ve become is me: happy, healthy, having fun and helping out everyone else. The worst rumour I’m trying to combat doesn’t even exist, but I fear my husband’s family will think I’m just freeloading while I await my SSN. He is taking care of me with no trouble, but I still go out of my way to go to my father-in-law’s to help him weed his garden, and I keep this place clean and tidy, and make meals for my husband and for anyone who comes over. My life is really peaceful right now, with no stress, no heartache, and no lies. If this is all I get out of life, I’m more than happy.
Wow. Sorry for the life story… I needed to get that out.
When I was in eleventh grade, I relocated to a different state, and started attending a very small, very clique-ish school. Needless to say, I didn’t fit in. Suddenly, a rumor started circulating about me that either
A. I had been born a hemaphrodite, and had a penis as well as breasts.
or
B. I had been born genetically a male, but secretly started taking hormones at a very young age to develop female characteristics.
The strange part is that I’m very obviously a female. I’m 5 feet tall with teeny, tiny hands and feet. When I was in eleventh grade, I weighed 95 lbs. Nothing about me looks remotely masculine. I don’t know why they didn’t choose a more plausible rumor to spread.
I was also tagged as the resident “devil worshiper” in high school. Kind of strange, since I was rather clean-cut and inoffensive. Kids would occasionally pull me aside and ask me questions about the occult. When I told them I didn’t know, they would smile slyly and say “ah”. So then I became a “hardcore won’t-spill-the-beans devil worshiper”. Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were all the rage back then, so it didn’t really cause me too much grief. All very odd though, since I had no particular interest in that sort of thing.
Now that I’m 37 and never married, I’ve heard at work that I’m obviously a closeted gay. 
Normally I wouldn’t care, but I have a rather testosterone driven job, so I’ve had to occasionally take a co-worker aside and threaten to pop 'em one. I’m single because I’m a something of a cootchy-hound (not proud of it, mind you), so again it’s a bit odd.
When I was a senior, my best friend and I went on a club trip. We handed in papers just before we left.
When we came back, our friends hinted that we were in big trouble and that the teacher had accused us during the classes we missed of cheating on the papers.
We showed up to class and the teacher took us into the hall and said we were cheaters and that I had written Jo’s paper and she mine. Why? Because my paper sucked and Jo’s paper didn’t and this teacher said that there was no way Jo was capable of writing such a good paper.
So the whole thing made the rounds of the school.
The funny parts are these:
- Jo and I had complained once during home room that the teacher was grading us on our reputations rather than our abilities.
- I actually had turned in my paper late. That meant that I had a five point penalty.
- The teacher claimed my paper sucked and Jo’s was good. (My paper really sucked. I had nothing to say, which was why it was late.)
- I still ended up with a higher score than Jo.
QED? I think so.
In high school, I had long hair and listened to hard rock, which was not all that common for a small West Virginia town in the 70’s. As a result, everyone believed I was on drugs, when in fact I’ve never touched them (I didn’t even smoke or drink).
Years later, I work as an engineer for the DoD (partially because of this, I keep my hair shorter than average) and play music at night. I’m also very fit. Apparently as a result of this, I started hearing rumors among other musicians that I was an ex-Marine, when in fact I’ve never been in the military.
I’m not sure which rumor was more inaccurate, or more damaging.
I went from getting beaten up in public school for being the only kid in an advanced program, to getting beaten up in high school because somebody started a rumor that I was gay. Nowadays this wouldn’t be such a problem, possibly, but then it was the beginning of the 1970s, in a town of 2000 people. Nobody would talk to me like I was a human being. They’d push me down the stairs, spray the hose on me as I walked by, write FAG on my locker, four or five of them would ambush me on the way home. A guy from school offered to drive me somewhere once, and instead drove me out into the country and exposed himself to me, like I wanted it. I was fourteen years old. It got so bad that I had to quit school and move away from that town to escape the rumors and the beatings and those awful, awful people.
I’ve successfully blocked all of mine out completely, but my boyfriend still remembers some of his. The ones I remember at the moment are that he was a drugged-out satanist… and that he ate squirrels after school in the girls’ locker room. Neither of us has the slightest idea where that one came from.
The rumors don’t go away when you become an adult.
When I first moved to Cleveland, I rented a house on a street that was inhabited mostly by married couples and families with children. I lived alone, with my two dogs, so demographically I stuck out like a sore thumb in familyland.
One neighbor told others with young children that they should steer clear of my house, “just in case, you know.” An occasional play ball would land in my backyard; they would never be retrieved. Lots of calls to the local code enforcement agency, because there might have been a stray dog turd on my lawn, or my dogs were barking as other dogs passed by while I was at work. Kids would run down the street, and always double back before they hit the property line in front of my house.
Although it was never said, it was implied - single guy in his 30s living alone = probably gay, and a possible child molester to boot.
I had lots of rumors that I was gay. Its actually interesting to see how common that was. My guess is if you don’t fit the gender status quo, then you=gay according to peers :rolleyes:
This made me really insecure in High School. I never wanted to be the ‘jock’ archetype, but I wanted to be physically strong and masculine and have a swagger that made people leave me the fuck alone. I tried hard in sports and such, but everything was so hypercompetitive, combined with my tendency to give up on things prematurely, just created this bitter cycle that had me more and more convinced I was this limp-wristed pansy.
In fact, when post-columbine rumors started going around about me, with people thinking I was going to blow up the school and/or shoot people, other kids finally stopped bugging me and left me alone. This was a huge rush, that people were terrified of me. In a strange sense, I felt a wierd duality going on; on one hand, I absolutely loathed that someone could make up such a vicious rumor and have most of the SCHOOL run with it, but on the other hand I kind of felt a rush from the power it had over people.
At my previous job, rumor spread that I had been in a meeting with the boss during which it was discussed whether I should be given UNIX access. Supposedly, a senior developer with UNIX access told the boss in front of my face that I was just a hacker and shouldn’t be given access to it, and I didn’t say anything in my defense.
Now, I’m not the most assertive of people, but I would certainly have objected to being classified as a jury-rigger slacker, especially since I needed UNIX access to do my job efficiently. The rumour made me seem like an absolute milquetoast.
The oddest for me was when my psycho sister-in-law told my non-psycho sister in-law that my husband and I had gotten divorced.
Now, she had had no contact with us at all for years, the last being when she notified us by letter that the wedding she had invited us to was cancelled (graciously not including a return of the cash wedding gift we had given or a refund on the hideous bridesmaid’s dress I’d had to buy). She had only gotten in touch with her sister to gloat over the fact that she had a baby and her sister didn’t. The sperm-donor was a near-stranger who was currently in prison, but never mind that. What she didn’t apparently know was that we talked with non-psycho sister all the time.
So the only possible motivation for it was to upset her sister even further. Cruel, stupid and completely pointless, which pretty much characterized all our interactions with her.
And what does PSIL do for a living? Why, she’s a marriage and family counselor, of course.
Oh yes… Incubus mentioned Columbine…
I had graduated and was out of school for a couple of years, but there was a friend of mine who was a couple years younger than me who was in Grade 12 when Columbine was all over the news. I’ll call him Anthony.
Now. Anthony has worn a trenchcoat since juniour high. He listened to Marilyn Manson and made no bones about it, and tried to reason with people daily. You might now the type… it’s almost like a … a… a goth hippy! Someone who will dress differently and follow their own path (he dressed like a goth often) and tries to teach people to get along; just because he looks different doesn’t mean he doesn’t have feelings, that there’s something deeper in everyone, etc. Brave soul, him.
So, there he was, the day after Columbine, going to school with his trenchcoat on, his shaved head, his spiked collar, and an anti-Nazi patch sewn on his arm (it was a swastika patch with a big, huge red line going through it, like a no-smoking sign, you know? Got him in a lot of trouble with his peers, who immediately called him a Nazi. So… do restaurants with non-smoking signs on them make them all smokers? Anyway, Anthony wore it because he studied the whole Nazi Germany thing in his spare time, and he didn’t believe in hating something he didn’t understand. Obviously, once he understood it, the patch made quite clear what he felt about it: he could dislike the Nazis and now he could say why he felt that way).
The teachers had a huge school assembly, (I was attending because I had helped out with some local charity work that was to be addressed then), and ordered Anthony to remove his trenchcoat and never wear it again. You know, though, if it were just a matter of fashion, he might have at least considered the idea. Besides it going against his principles, well… his family was very, very poor. That trenchcoat he had been wearing for years and years was, in fact, the only coat he had. Granted, it was late April… but we lived in the Maritimes, in Canada. It’s still very cold in April. There’s usually still frost and snow on the ground every morning when he walked to school.
So, Anthony stood against them all, and said he would not remove his jacket. He refused to perpetuate a ridiculous, unfounded threat. He told them, all of them in the assembly, that he wore the trenchcoat because he was cold. He told them that it didn’t make him a killer.
There was very brief silence. Then one of the hockey team players stood up and yelled “Let’s kill him before he kills us!” The entire gymnasium took up the shout: “KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!”
And if that was the scariest moment of my life, I can’t even begin to imagine how it was for Anthony. He turned toward the door, and did probably the most sensible thing he could have done: he ran. A couple guys chased him, but he was gone, gone, gone.
He ran all the way home.
The cherry on top? The teachers called him up that night, and suspended him for a week.
He did go back to finish off his year. I mean, by April, it’s just so close to throw it all away. He was spit on in the halls, and people would throw dog shit at his house and terrify his family, but he did make it. They booed him as he got up to get his diploma.
Shortly after graduation he and his family moved the hell out of there. After they were gone, the morons he went to school with burned his old house down, dancing and cheering.
deep sigh Yeah, I come from a bad, bad place.
I had a guy tell a bunch of people that I gave him genital warts. He did this with me present, while I was on LSD. That was one of the worst moments of my life.
Later it turned out that the doctor was wrong and that they were moles. That asshole. It was too late by then to undo the damage to my reputation, not to mention my psyche.
Well my happiness during High school was ruined by a rumour that I was Gay.
When I was in high school, I was standing near a friend of mine and suddenly passed out (I was fasting in a weird kind of teenage girl protest thing), hitting my head on a table. I was sent home for the day and when I returned, found there were three rumours circulationg about what happened. The most damaging of these, though not to me, was that my friend Mary had inexplicably started beating me up. I guess she took quite a bit of abuse due to this, poor girl. Other rumours were that I was pregnant or that I’d passed out due to a drug overdose.
Next major rumour that came along was when I was an active member in a chat room. I picked up a stalker who posted there and on interent dating sites that I was a heroin addict, I had been arrested for prostitution, I’d do anything sexually for my next hit of heroin, I was a lesbian, I liked certain rather bizarre sexual things, and my thankfully old phone number. Nobody who knew me, online or off, believed any of his stories, but it did make my life hell for a while.
And finally, a month or so ago, I was speaking with a woman who I don’t really know, other than that she works in a different lab on the same floor I did. She told me she’d be praying for me and not knowing quite why she’d say that, I just kind of mumbled “Oh ok, thank you.”
She then replied that she didn’t really mean she’d be praying for me, but that I’d change my mind. I gave her a bewildered look and said “Huh?” only to be utterly dumbfounded when she responded that she hoped I’d change my mind about having an abortion.
Only thing I can figure out is that it was well-known in the department that I’d had surgery a couple months prior and had another one scheduled for the next week and somehow it’d come about that if I had to have surgery on such short notice, it must be because I was pregnant and was nearing the cut-off date for an abortion. That one kind of hurt because the surgery I did need to have was a hysterectomy and lymph node removal and while I really and truly don’t want another child, I didn’t want to lose the ability to have one if I someday changed my mind.
Anyway, rumours suck.