23. Imagine being u/djaxial‘s dad’s mailman?
Not me but my Dad. We moved and he was convinced the postman’s name was ‘Ger’ as in short for Gerry. He greeted him by it, nearly every day for about 10 years. We even gave him a Christmas card which he displayed down in the sorting office.
Fast forward and we have a temporary post man, my Mum asking him after a few weeks ‘When is Ger coming back?’ This was met with stunned silence and a puzzled look, with a resounding ‘Who is Ger? No one works in the locality by that name’
Turns out, his name is Declan and he was too nice to correct my Dad for close to a decade.
24. That’s what being thoughtful gets you, u/sometimesIuseReddit:
somebody thought I was jewish and I didn’t want to correct them because I hate confrontation. So now everyone in the school thinks im Jewish and my homeroom got me a Passover card signed by everyone my brain told me it was time to stop but I didn’t want to ruin the thought of the gesture.
25. At least u/Outrageous_Claims learned a valuable skill:
I moved to a new city when I was in 6th grade and on the same day I started two other boys started and they both knew how to skateboard, so I lied and said I did to. Then for months I lied about being able to skateboard to them and other kids at the school, and I never came clean because I didn’t want anyone to call me a poser. So I bought skater boy clothes, and a skateboard and learned how to skateboard because I lied about knowing how to skateboard. Still skating since then. I’m 27 now.
26. u/ThePlanckNumber learned the, er, easy way, that sometimes things just fall into place:
I was dating a girl and I met her parents. I was a freshman in college seeking my physics degree, when I met her dad he asked me why in the world I would go into physics when it is a difficult field to get work in. Thinking on the spot I said “yeah I’ve thought about that too and I’ve decided to switch to mechanical engineering”. Welp I’ll be getting my mech engineering degree this may
Edit:
To answer some questions that have been coming up. 1) yes i know what potatoes are 2) no I broke up with her 3) Yes im very happy with my decision to switch to engineering
27. Life has a way, u/kolpy99:
Told a small lie to a girl I was texting that I love running, dunno how it sold because I was fat. Started running the second after I sent that. 5 years later I went from 298 to 180.
Not bad.
28. I wouldn’t wish that on your wife or anyone else, u/ViolentEastCoastCity:
Someone bought my wife a Vera Bradley handbag. She doesn’t care for Vera Bradley, but uses the bag anyway.
Because of her use of Vera Bradley, people buy her Vera Bradley things. She has a ton of it, plus gift cards to Vera Bradley. So naturally she has a ton of Vera Bradley accessories. She is now considered by others to be ‘very into’ Vera Bradley, so she gets more stuff from Vera Bradley.
This is her life now.
29. Wow, u/shanewater, could you be more casual?
30. u/Steve0512 gives a rare example of being happy to pay full price:
I became friends with one of the managers at Panera. One day as I was giving a cashier my order, he told her to give me the same discount as they give to firemen, police and paramedics, i think. He just chose this discount as it was an easy button to push on the register. Well this cashier really thought I was a fireman. I’m not. So for the next two years this cashier gave me the discount. Even if she wasn’t serving me, she would go out of her way to tell the cashier that was helping me, “He’s a fireman, give him the discount”. It snowballed into such an awkward situation that I didn’t know how to get out of it. Luckily that cashier eventually transferred to another store and I now happily pay full price.
31. Sometimes life has other plans for you, and also for u/SuperSig1:
I told my dad that I would love to follow in his military footsteps while unbeknownst to him I absolutely hated the idea. Well On my 20th birthday he took me out for lunch and a few beers. Right after that he took me to his best friends recruiting office and 2 hours later I was confused, drunk, and basically convinced by my dad and his idiot friends that this would be the best thing I could ever do.
After 2 tours in Afghanistan, one divorce, and 10 years of my life they were definitely right.
Edit: I’ll share the worst part in my opinion. After I signed the paperwork, while I was drunk I might add, I planned on trying to get out of it. I took some time and thought long and hard about what I was going to tell me dad. So the weekend after this happens I told my dad I was coming over on Saturday to talk about everything he said no problem. Do you know what he did? He told my whole fuckin family and they suprised me with a huge party to celebrate my enrollment in the army… Everyone was so damn proud you would have thought I was already a conquering hero or something. In the end I sucked it up and endured.
32. u/gabriot learned competitiveness accidentally:
In 4th grade I lied and said I was going to a track meet to impress some friends in class when the teacher asked if anyone was going. I went home and told my mom I needed to sign up for it. I was never good at athletics at this time in my life.
I ended up going to the track meet, it was a 400m race I was entered in, I remember the moment the gun went off I immediately went into a mode I had never remotely gone into before, I was actually ultra competitive for once in my life. I was neck and neck with another kid for the first place spot the entire race, and going into the final stretch I felt like puking and every fiber of my body was burning and he was pulling away. Something came over me and I kicked it into psycho mode and pushed past him for the win and my legs felt like noodles and I collapsed and couldn’t get back up.
That race qualified me for a regional meet, I did that one and won again in similar fashion, then went to the state meet and got my ass handed to me. That started me down a long line of running long distance which involved being one of the best in the nation in high school and getting a scholarship to run in college, and trust me the training at that level consumes your life (100 mile weeks), so it was definitely my life at that point.
33. u/giro_di_dante‘s incredibly epic saga is a) Worth the read and B) makes you feel bad about your own British accent imitation:
In Vegas for a bachelor party. I was 21 or 22 at the time. Got wasted. Made a bet with a friend while we were out at the club: “If you’re wrong, you have to pretend to be British the rest of the night.”
I lost. I was British.
Met a girl, who started talking to me because she overheard me saying some bullshit to my friends in a British accent. She thought that I was British. I went with it.
I slept with said girl. Had to wake up hungover the next morning and continue to be British. She said that we should hang out again that night. Sure. Meet said girl, and she’s brought all of her friends – who all think that I’m British. So I’m British again, but around more people. My friends are dying every time I talk. One tried to be Australian around the girl’s friends, but was called out for being a fraud.
My fraudulence continued to go unnoticed. Had to answer all kinds of questions about my life and childhood. I had never been to the U.K. Fortunately, I was an English lit major, and also watched a 3 or 4 British movies. Mostly Monty Python. Thus, I was more or less an expert on all things British.
I got tired of doing the accent. So I started saying deliberately incorrect things about England to see if someone would call me out (more fun than randomly admitting it). Turns out that 21 year old American women are too dumb to know a fucking thing about England, so they were incapable of pointing out my bullshit.
I like to think that, to this day, 12 years later, there are girls out there who think that the British invented tea and only drink it on Wednesdays, that Cromwell was a benevolent leader who gave out free pheasant to the impoverished Irish, that James Bond was written by an Indian guy, and that the only reason that Brits are known to dress nicely is because it’s illegal to not wear a tie on weekdays.
The accent took over my mind so completely that, when a guy in line at that restroom said something to me (in a very clearly English accent), I instinctively responded in an English accent. He got excited. I realized what I had done, but just went with it. He introduced me to his friends (mates). They mentioned that they couldn’t pinpoint where I was from. I told them my mom was American and I lived half my life in Maine (bullshit), and that’s why I have a strange accent. They went with it.
Brought the Brits back to our group. So now I had British homies. My friends couldn’t believe it. I’ve entered British Level 5,000. So many level ups in so short a time.
Fucked that girl again. Even talked dirty to her. Didn’t know how to talk dirty Britishly. I said “I’ve come” instead of “I’m coming.” Thought that the present perfect made dirty talk sound more British than the standard present continuous. I laughed at my own bullshit. The British are coming, indeed.
I admitted to her the next day that I wasn’t British. She didn’t believe me, and refused to accept that I was American. So fuck it, I was British for another half a day.
Thanks Maggie, for the good time, and for believing in me. That’s when I realized that I really could be anything that I wanted to be.