I’m sitting in the garage listening to Mr. Ujest and his friend G. tell stories. I’ve heard all my husband’s stories, but G.'s stories are hysterical. He is very good at pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.
Example:
Some guy at an shop he worked at was bragging how he was going to have a square slab of concrete poured for a patio for free because he had a buddy that ran a cement business for patios and foundations, and had some extra cement left over from pouring *a circular * drive way. This guy was really proud of himself for saving great gobs of cash.
Enter my friend G who sat their and said, " You mean you used *circular * cement to pour a square slab? " After quite some time and extreme bullshitting, my friend convinced this guy - twenty some years older than he was at the age of 20 - that the corners of his free square slab was going to curl up at any moment.
When the stooge came in the next morning - after talking to his cement friend - he let G. have it and everyone in the shop just about pissed themselves.
My friend managed to convice a really gulible guy that they were going to jump off the gym roof of my school. He finally found out that they were bsing him when he went to ask the teacher if he could watch It WAS SO FUNNY.
At summer camp one year, two of the girls in my group convinced another girl that umpteen came between nineteen and twenty.
A few years ago, my sister was irritated that her best friend, Allison, was being a music trendoid. So, my sister, her friends, and I convinced Allison that (the non-existant song) “Turnip Truck, My Ass” by (the non-existant singer) Ariana Bulshekivik was incredibly popular. We got random kids to sing snippets of the song (we lifted the “lyrics” from a letter one of my friends wrote describing his car) in Allison’s presence. We would call her up and ask if she had been listening to a certain station, because they had just finished playing “Turnip Truck.” For a couple of weeks, we drove Allison insane because she felt she wasn’t up on the latest trend. The best part was when she called up the local radio station to request the song and the DJ asked if she was on crack.
Last summer, I took this apprenticeship at King Richard’s Faire, a renaissance festival in the Massachusetts area. It required a lot of free time (10-8 Sat & Sun), and it wasn’t paid.So in order for me to make my car payments, I had to get my 40 hours in at work during the regular week, on top of going to school. It was very stressful. I dropped out the second week. I never told my boss I quit. For the next 3 months, I got weekends off, and if I decided to do them a favor, I’d come in after my exhausting day and work 8 pm to close or something. It was great. I even made employee of the month that summer, lol. Only one person knew, and he just laughed at me every time someone would praise me for my dedication. The best part was when he tried to use me to get discounted tickets for some crew outing thing. I convinced him we were booked through the season, and he gave up.
Once, I shared a shift with a guy and two girls, who were younger than me and we were all kind of silly in a fun way. We were all best of buds. So anyway, Bob was blind in one eye and it didn’t quite track with the other eye. He had convinced Cotrina that he had a glass eye. Cotrina used to tease him and ask when he’d take it out and show it to her (you know, that weird fascination thing.) He’d always say he’d do it one day…
So finally, since Bob was hispanic and had beautiful medium brown eyes, I brought in a brown glass marble for him to play his trick with. He told Cotrina he’d show her the glass eye. He took a tissue and hid the marble in it and pretended he was taking it out. The marble fell out of his hands with a satisfying glass-hitting-tile noise and rolled under a big draft printer. Meanwhile, he’s holding the tissue over his “eye-socket”. His wife calls while all this is going on. He is talking to her, telling her he can’t talk right now, his glass eye rolled under the printer. What we can’t hear is his wife going “Oh, come on, Bob, you’re pulling that old stunt again?” While Bob is on the phone, I get the flashlight and Cotrina and I are down on hands and knees looking for his “eye.” We see it under the printer. I tell Trina to get it. “Nuh-uh, I’m not picking it up!” is her response. So I grab the “eye” and hand it back to Bob without letting her see it. He pretends to put it back in. Trina is still freaking. We let her in on the joke and we’re all laughing our heads off. Bridget walks in. She asks what we’re all laughing about. I said something like “oh, we’re just laughing 'cause Bob dropped his glass eye.” She laughs and says something like “yeah, right.” “No, really, it rolled under the printer and we had to get it out.” Then she felt really bad because she’d laughed about Bob’s glass eye. We got distracted by some actual work that had to be done and never let her in on the joke.
A couple of months later, me and Trina and Bridget are all sitting around at my house drinking and something came up about it. When Bridget found out the whole thing was a joke, she was SO pissed at us because had been feeling bad about hurting Bob’s feelings by laughing about his glass eye. She almost killed us!
This guy Nathan and I had a thing for awhile, and his rooommate convinced this girl who lived in the dorm directly below theirs that Nathan and I were brother and sister. She completely believed him (despite the fact that we look nothing alike), but didn’t tell us. One night we were drunk, and we accidentally walked into her room, thinking it was his, and started making out on her bed. She totally freaked out–just yelling at us, calling us freaks and perverts, and we just didn’t get it. A couple weeks later, I learned she thought we were siblings, and I’ve been meaning to apologize to her, but she avoids me a lot.
I’m blessed with quite a good poker face, so I can convince people of some pretty outrageous things.
About once a year I’m able to get someone to believe “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary.
On Friday there was a big Atlanta Hash Christmas party, at which a girl I know got really, really drunk. So drunk that she didn’t remember everything that happened.
Yesterday I saw her again at another party, and told her that on Friday she’d taken off her top and flashed everyone in attendance. Of course I surreptitiously walked around the room and gained several co-conspirators, who then raised their eyebrows at her or told her incredulously, “I can’t believe you did that Friday night!”
There is a story from the ancient Chinese Empire, that once some wily courtiers wanted to get rid of the emperor through a palace coup–but in a subtle way.
So they painted a horse purple and let it walk through the palace grounds. When the emperor said, “Hey, what’s that purple horse doing there?” the courtiers said “What purple horse, Your Majesty? We don’t see any purple horse.” And they would look at each other and touch their finger to their foreheads. After they pulled several tricks like that, the emperor began to seriously doubt his own sanity. Eventually he wound up stark raving bonkers and had to be replaced.
The tale is told of Saint Thomas Aquinas, when he was a youth in the novitiate:
One day he was at table in the refectory, and some of the other novices decided to play a joke on him. They stood at the window and called, “Brother Thomas, come and see quickly! A flying ox!” So he heaved his considerable bulk out of the chair and went to the window. As he returned to his seat amid the general howls of laughter, he said: “Better to believe in a flying ox than a lying monk.”
Once at McDonald’s during a Science Olympiad trip a friend of mine convinced a (right-handed) junior high kid that she was using a left-handed fork. The kid actually went back to the counter to ask for a right-handed fork!
It WAS SO FUNNY.