I used to work in one of Ontario’s Beer Stores. One day, I carded a guy.
Me: Can I see some ID please?
Guy pats his pockets, then says, “I left it in the car.”
Me: Okay, can you go back to the car and get it?
Guy: Ummm … I left the car at home.
I knew one of those when I was in high school. The most unbelievable lie he ever told me was that he had five or six pairs of identically-framed prescription eyeglasses, each with a different prescription, because “the ophthalmologist tested my eyes and my prescription shifts around all the time, so I have to change the eyeglasses I wear every few hours so that I can see properly.”
WTF? That doesn’t even remotely make sense. I told him that was an idiotic lie filled with logical inconsistencies, and I asked him if I could see the other identical pairs of glasses he must be carrying around, but he had conveniently “left them in the car” and couldn’t leave the theatre (we were rehearsing a play at the time). He just doubled down and insisted it was true.
My dad once told me, when I was young, that geese don’t actually honk when they fly; it was the sound of the air being compressed under their wings.
Fast forward to the 90s, watching a video taken alongside a flock of geese flying in typical V-formation – and they’re clearly honking with their mouths.
Me: …
Me: …
Me: …
Me: heyyyyyyyy … the Old Man was kidding me!
I called him on it and he literally had no memory of telling me that in what, the late 70s? We had a good laugh.
When I was 6 or 7, my sister told me about a baseball pitcher who supposedly died because he threw a baseball so hard that it circled the globe and hit him in the back of his head.
Salesman at a Verizon store: told me that I needed to buy a separate hotspot, because if I used the hotspot option on the phone I was looking at the phone was likely to catch on fire.
I did not buy the hotspot-only device. I did buy the phone; but I didn’t buy it there.
That may, however, be topped by the dealership that I, being young and innocent (and female, which may have had something to do with it) took my car to for inspection many years ago.
First, they told me that the car had a cracked turning signal lens (true), and that this caused it to fail inspection (also true, I think) and that turning signal lenses were no longer available for that car.
At which point I, being still young (at the time) and female but not being quite that damn innocent, started saying in a loud carrying voice to them and in effect to all the potential customers in the showroom looking at the cars: “Are you seriously trying to tell me that I have to buy a new car because this three year old car has a cracked turning signal lens and SAAB doesn’t supply parts for three year old cars?”
They suddenly found that they had a spare lens cover in their parts department after all.
And then, after that, when they should have already known I was going to be suspicious, they told me that although the car had then passed inspection, the front brakes were in very bad shape and would need new pads very soon; shouldn’t they just go ahead and put them on?
I said, “That’s funny. I just had new brake pads put on that car a couple of months ago.” They said, “People who aren’t familiar with these cars (it was a SAAB back when those were rare in the USA) often put them on backwards and they’ll wear out really fast that way.” I said “That’s funny. The people who put them on were the SAAB dealer where my parents live and they’re one of the oldest dealerships in the country.”
I took the car to a local mechanic who I knew and had him check the brake pads. They were fine.
I would name the dealer – I told people about them for years afterward — but at this point I doubt any of the people concerned are still involved with it; that was somewhere around 1975.
I don’t know if this was unbelievable at the time, since I believed it - the girl next door told me that when you go to sleep, your heart stops beating. I was about 7 - what did I know? But I used to lie in bed with my hand over my heart to see if it stopped.
This is the same girl who told me if you were touching a window screen (back when they were all metal) when lightning flashed, you’d be electrocuted. Wonder if this is something she’d been told or a misunderstanding, or if she was just a liar.
I attended a timeshare presentation a long time ago. 'Nuff said.
An ex boy friend of an ex girl friend said that he fought in Viet Nam (he would have been, maybe 5yo at the time). He said that to save his buddies, he grabbed an enemy grenade with his hand, and it blew up.
And they sewed his hand back on. That doesn’t desserve even a 
, was time to call the big guys in the white coats and a very large net.
I have had several eleven-year-olds look me in the eye and insist that they absolutely did not do the thing I just caught them doing. “No, miss, I didn’t steal that phone” (that I just pulled from their backpack). “No, miss, I didn’t break into that locker” (that I just showed them video of themselves doing). I came to realize that the louder and more indignant a person gets, the more likely it is they’re lying.
My friend LR used to tell me of his dreams for working with NASA. I was running a D&D campaign with him as a player, and he just kept piling on how he had contacted NASA and they were interested in signing him up. This went on for a few weeks until he said he had to quit the campaign because the NASA recruiter was coming to pick him up. A few days later, he was still around. He said the recruiter’s mother was sick and he had to take care of her, so LR didn’t get to go to NASA. He could have just driven down there himself if NASA had really signed him up, but I didn’t point that out. I let the lie die on its own.
Funny, you mention this. . .
A few weeks ago, I was on a five-hour layover at LAX, so I thought I’d stretch my legs and head out of the busy terminal to the USO. I’d arrived earlier than it opened, so I was hanging out on a bench outside the front door. If you haven’t been to LAX recently, there’s a metric ton of construction going on, coupled with lots of homeless folk about. I could see the former, but wasn’t expecting the latter. That is, up until a woman, pushing her limited possessions on a luggage cart tried to open up one of the construction workers’ pickup trucks for some opportunistic spoils. Honking horns and blaring alarms ensued, and a nearby LAPD officer stepped out of the shadows to strongly advise the ne’er do well, in loud, clear language that would make R. Lee. Ermey blush.
The woman countered back with a string of obscenities towards the officer, but ultimately started to push her cart along, pausing intermittently to hurl more insults back towards the cop. Unfortunately, I noted her direction of travel was towards me. While she was still fifty yards away, I quietly made my way up a set of concrete stairs and out of sight, on a patio by the door, not wanting a confrontation. My perambulance was for naught, though, as she found a handicapped access ramp and started wheeling her stuff up the incline.
I tried to be inconspicuous, but realized that I had only moments to move again. But by the time I got my backpack slung over my shoulder, she was already at the top of the incline. Immediately, she demanded, “Excuse me SIRRRRR, but where are the women at?” Not knowing what she was talking about, I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. . . Her reply to this failed to include a segway, so I was hit with, “What the f&ck do you mean you don’t know? A LADYYYY just asked you a question.” Again, I replied to her that I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. She immediately, and boldly, retorted, “Well, you owe me fifty bucks!”
I looked at her for a moment, realizing from a distance of 45 feet that she was quite ‘chemically enhanced’, and that I desired no further part of this potential ambush. Discretion being the better part of valor, I immediately walked across some landscaping, directly away from her and her mouth-noise, going on about “Where’s my money, bitch?” and other such nonsense. I found another bench, and waited twenty minutes before the doors opened at 9:AM. By this time, the harpy had flown off. . .
Kind of a long story, but I’m still struck by the audacity of the whole thing. My amazement is tempered, though, by the knowledge that I was probably engaging with some form/combination of substance abuse or mental illness.
Tripler
No, madam, this fifty is reserved for Cecil Adams.
A guy I knew in high school was a pathological liar (there seem to be a lot of them). He once claimed to own a guitar once owned by either Rossington or Collins (I’ve forgotten the detail) of Lynyrd Skynyrd. When I asked for proof, he said, “I sold it so I could go to college!” After years of putting up with his bullshit (he met Bruce Springsteen, not once, but twice, and Springsteen remembered him the second time), I called him on it, and he said, “Well, most of it’s true!”
And one from when I was about 7: my family and I were travelling in Europe (Scotland I think this was–it was maybe summer 1969), and I was in the common floor bathroom of the hotel. My sister knocked on the door and said, “'Tis the maid, let me in!” Of course, I thought it really was the maid, and I panicked. More of a practical joke than a lie, I guess, but she still lied about it–funny now, but not then.
I knew a guy like that in high school as well. I’m sure there were plenty of other stories he told, but the one that stuck with me was when he claimed he had hacked into the school’s computer system. But he wasn’t able to change his grade or anything like that, because the system kicked him out because it thought he was a virus. He knew this because he typed “Why?” and the computer responded “Virus detected.”
I’m repeating what @CairoCarol said, but WTF? That doesn’t even remotely make sense. At least to anyone who has ever used a computer before. This was in the 1990s when a good chunk of the population still didn’t have computers, and it was pretty clear his knowledge of computers and hacking came almost entirely from movies. Besides that, I’m not even sure if the school’s computers were even networked at the time (like many schools, they were pretty behind the times technologically). I remember my English teacher having students hand deliver our grades to the office on a floppy disk.
When I was in primary school aged about 7, there was a discussion where babies came from.
We couldn’t decide, so agreed to ask our parents.
The next day brought:
- God sends them
- the stork brings them
- you pick them up in a hospital
- they grow in Mummy’s tummy (that was my wonderful parents
)
After more waffling, the others agreed on the hospital explanation (after all there was ‘evidence’ … his Mum had no baby; she went to hospital; she came back with a baby.)
“I’m only with her because I want my son to grow up in a stable home.”
I believed it for 7 years because I was young, had no self-esteem and was stupid. I finally knew it for the lie it was when I walked away and he tried to give me a ring and divorce papers. I knew I wouldn’t be able to trust him after the previous 7 years and handed him the ring back with "I can’t. "
As of now, he is still married to her, over 25 years later. Glad I got out of that situation, even if it did teach me a lot about myself.
I can’t think of any whoppers this minute, although I’ve known several pathological liars. But what I’ve learned in general is that if you ask somebody a question and they begin their answer with “I’m not going to lie to you,…”, they’re lying.
When I was a teenager coming home from school my mom greeted me at the door in hysterics, she was crying saying the family dog bit her. When I asked to see the wound she showed me her hand and CLEARLY she had literally just put ketchup on her hand but was legitimately claiming the dog had bit her. I have no idea what her goal was in all of this since she loved that dog, but I pretended she was actually hurt and gave her some Neosporin and band-aids for the cut.
Another mom one, our cat had kittens. She told us she had fixed the cat. She was the type who will NEVER allow herself to ever be proven wrong, so her excuse as to why the fixed cat had kittens was “I saw the cat going to the neighbors yard all morning, grabbing kittens from another cat and bringing them home”. Despite all the kittens literally looking the same color as their mom.
Grandma’s friend: “How old are you?”
Grandma: “65.”
My uncle: “Momma, I’m 62.”
Grandma: “You liar!”
Another co-worker lies story. This co-worker had a wife in the Army serving several hours away from home. Every other week the guy would take Friday and Monday off for a long weekend to visit her. He very rarely came back on Tuesday and often not on Wednesday either. And each time the boss would tell us that his truck broke down or his cat got away at a truck stop and he had to stay there until he found her, or his dog got bit by a snake and had to go to the vet, or he got bit by the dog and had to go to the ER (we called this one snakebite by proxy). I finally asked him if he actually believed all this bullshit and he said that the guy just had a lot of bad luck. No one could ever figure out why the boss covered for this guy. But he continued to tell us these lies for months until other bad behavior led to the guy getting fired.
I have a cousin who seem to lie for sport. I do not trust him on anything. I heard a recording of him in the barracks talking to his buddies. Another guy had some sort of health issue, and the story was that he had had a particular nether part removed, “It was the left one. That’s the shooting-ball, so now it just dribbles out.”