Have you ever been mistaken for someone else?

[SnickettyLemon]

I had a rather upsetting incident some years ago. A new girl had started my DD's school and I thought I recognised her mother from a weekend performing arts group I had attended 20 odd years previously. Whenever I tried to catch her eye she seemed to avoid me. Eventually I managed to stop her and asked if she was ' Janet Smith '( obviously not her real name) she said she was, and when I asked if she remembered me she replied that unfortunately she did and they were not good memories. I was surprised as I recalled that we had been good pals and I assumed she had enjoyed the classes. She replied that I had been a bully, and had made her life a misery. Again I was shocked as I had been a 'goody goody at school and would hardly say boo to a goose. This was the reason my parents had sent me to drama classes to help with my confidence. She started to say that I had intimidated her during inter-school sports matches. Well anyone who knows me would confirm that I had no more chance of being picked to represent my school in any sport as I would to play football for England. So I told her this and said she must be mistaken. She refused to believe me. By this point I was nearly in tears and just managed to mutter that I had been about to say I had remembered her from the drama school. She then questioned how I knew about that, so I told her facts about plays we had done and funny things that had happened. She obviously then realised that she had made a mistake confusing me with someone else. She apologised and we had a hug. I still wonder if by then she had told any of the other mums that I had bullied her. Sorry for long thread, but I feel better after sharing this.

Years ago in our local supermarket a man came up to me and said hello in a very familiar way and went on to say my new hairstyle was lovely. He was very apologetic when we established I wasn’t his friend and he swore I had a double in the are but It’s never happened again.

Sorry thar your encounter was so upsetting.

Yes and she's still adamant that I'm someone else.

I avoid her like the plague now. Proper freaked me out

I had a woman at my DDs activity keep talking to me in an over familiar way. I thought she was just very outgoing, but it turned out she just thought I was my sister. She knew my sister through their kids, so not sure what she thought I'd done with my niece and nephew!

Yes. Chain bakery (think Greggs), three different shops, they all thought I was one of their HR people and therefore probably bad news. It was quite strange at the first shop, then a bit unnerving at the others.
I’ve stalked the woman on social media and she absolutely could be my long lost sister.

Yesterday, at work mistaken for someone else. "Are you doing DofE walks tomorrow, when will you be back?" I said it wasn't me, other person was confused and afterwards I realised that he really didn't believe that I am not the DofE organiser but someone else entirely. He just thinks the DofE woman is not coming in and has palmed his year group off on someone else.. To be fair I should have explained more explicitly but he was interrupting a conversation I was having with a student about something important so my focus was not on him.

DofE woman is very nice and at a pinch looks similar to me but 5 years older than me minimum and 6 months pregnant!!

I was once mistaken for a contestant on The Apprentice many years ago in a really busy London bar. My protestations only convinced them further and when we left, shirtly after, they thought it was becuase I'd been recognised 😂

Yes at a hobby. The instructor kept calling me a name similar to my own so I assumed she’d misheard (think Emily/Amy) and being really overly friendly with me. I was sort of reserved but polite as I was nervous and a bit anxious at starting a new hobby and can be a bit socially awkward at first. I couldn’t understand why she kept singling me out for jokes and things and saying “I know you can take it”, “you weren’t saying that in the club on Saturday night” etc. I felt really embarrassed.

It went on for a few weeks but she was getting more and more spiteful and angry towards me and had started giving me evil looks and clearly gossiping about me. She ended up asking me, at the end of the class, what time I’d got home on Sunday morning.

I was ???

“You were wasted when I left, what time did you get in from the hen do?”

?????

I explained I wasn’t at a hen do at the weekend and I was on medication that meant I couldn’t drink alcohol.

She looked at the people she’d clearly been gossiping about me to for weeks and said “SEE? THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!!! Whatever, Emily, I don’t know what your problem with me is!” and stormed off.

The rest of the class looked at me. One piped up, “I thought you were called
Amy..” and a few asked what it was all about. I explained I genuinely didn’t know and I really wasn’t at a hen do that weekend. I was really embarrassed and felt very awkward and was considering not returning. I went up to her and said very politely “look, I don’t know if you’ve mistaken me for someone else but my name isn’t Emily and I wasn’t at a hen do with you this weekend and I never met you until I joined this class x weeks ago.”

She was going “whatever Emily, I don’t know what kind of game this is that you are playing but it’s weird.”

It took a fellow classmate who knew me and suggested I show her my driving licence to go to her and say I was being truthful.

The following week she came and apologised and said “I don’t know what I was thinking, you don’t even really look or talk like her! So weird!”

She’d thought I was her former line manager. I googled her. We aren’t remotely alike.

I mean seriously.

What planet was she on?!

I've been likened to Sarah Millican when I smile. The rest of me is nothing like her. To be honest, I looked up at the TV one night and thought...what am I doing on TV and it was Sarah..Ha!

I’m just recalling it all with a stupid grin on my face now at how batshit it all was, though at the time it was actually horrid.

The following week when I went back to the class (and only as I’d forked up cash in advance or I wouldn’t have bothered) she walked towards me with her arms outstretched as it to give me a hug with a big (quite scary) smile and announced...

“You’re not Emily”

As if I didn’t already know that.

“You’re not...you aren’t her. You don’t even look like her. Or speak like her. You aren’t Emily!”

Yes, batshit lady, I am aware that I am not Emily. Please stop informing me. This is not new information.

“Yeah...you’re not Emily...we DON’T know each other!!! You’re...you’re...”

“Amy.”

“AMY!!! Not Emily!!! Why did I think you were Emily?!”

“I...don’t know”

“I DON’T know!!!!!!! You don’t even LOOK like her!!!!!! Well. AMY. It’s so LOVELY to meet you. I can actually introduce myself properly to you now!!!!!”

Then after all of it she joked...

“Now AMY are you sure you aren’t really Emily and this is all just a very weird elaborate hoax?...” Totally deadpan. Followed by a long pause and a loud tinkly laugh.

I don’t think I mentioned this but, having found dear Emily on LinkedIn, assuming we’d pass for twins,

We aren’t even the same race.

I didn’t stay long at that hobby. I assumed she was unhinged and always felt a little afraid after that.

I moved to a new area a few years ago. One day I needed something from the local pharmacy and the lady who served me asked me "how's your mum doing? Send her my love". So I told her she'd got the wrong person but she was adamant. I explained that she'd definitely got the wrong person because my Mum was dead. She then got really upset thinking that the woman she thought was mum was dead. So then i had to go into detail and tell her that my mum had been dead for 5 years and lived miles away when she was alive and she'd definitely got the wrong person. She was mortified. Its been 2 years since and she still won't properly look at me when I go in the shop for something.

I was mistaken for Cheryl Tweedy on the red carpet at the TV BAFTAs by a line of paps! It was hilarious. I was working in production on the event and it was probably the year the band had one whatever show it was they won so she wasn’t as well known as she became to be. I can see a tiny likeness I guess but not much. One pap started shouting Cheryl Cheryl and then they all did and started taking photos of me. I ran off laughing so they probably soon realised it wasn’t me.

I was once mistaken for the girl with curly hair from Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps .

Obviously quite some time ago and he was very very drunk!

I get mistaken for my twin but I guess that doesn't count! Some people are really insistent. Even when I say you must know my twin, not me, they still say 'don't be silly, you know me from tennis....' I have to repeat i am sorry, I don't know who you are several times. Then they retreat and give me confused and evil glances.

I regularly got mixed up with a friend at University, we looked quite similar. Once I even thought she was me in a group photo someone showed me, until I realised I didn't have a shirt like the one she was wearing! People who saw us together were convinced we were sisters.
Weirdly, after Uni I got married to a man with her (relatively unusual surname) and I did change my name. Now my friend and I even have the same surname, so we find it even harder to persuade people we're not related.

Year ago, I went into a pub in North London which I'd never been in before and the landlord said he was surprised I had the nerve to come in after the trouble I'd caused. Seems he thought I was the magistrates' clerk who'd given him a lot of grief when he was applying to extend his licence. Convinced him I wasn't.

Years ago!

I was hitchhiking a few years after leaving school & a car with a really old couple stopped.

They thought I was a girl I had gone to school with (in the same class) who was a relative of theirs.

They still gave me a lift (& the lecture they had planned to give her for hitching.)

A customer came into our shop and said, "Gee, Lucy, you look just like Ann. You used to have blond hair." I am Ann, Lucy is my cousin.

Years ago I had a job interview at an investment bank, told receptionist who took me to outside a meeting room. Someone shook my hand and said oh you are running the presentation lovely to meet you. I was strange interview. Then about 20 people came up to shake my hand and say nice to meet you and mentioned a video call I was running. One asked if they could go in the room, I said yes fine as seemed pointless everyone in the corridor. I then offered everyone tea and coffee as a delaying tactic as I had no idea how to run a video conference, it was in the 90s.

Thankfully then the girl actually running the meeting turned up and I could escape and get to the interview.

Years before that a girl insisted I was at school with her and was really querying it that I wasn't and she said I looked identical and had the same bag.

Most bizarre though was when Michael Portillo walked up to me on a Westminster Street and said hello I know you.

I used to work somewhere where there was a really annoying busybody of a woman in another department that we had to go to occasionally.

This woman would frequently give me shit about blanking her on high street at the weekend and I would forever be saying I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. She would never believe me and was quite difficult about it, and I would always be saying ‘I genuinely don’t remember the last time I was in , I usually go to as it’s more convenient from my house. I have no idea who she was haranguing every Saturday morning but not me.

When I was working at a university I had a cousin a few years younger than me studying there. I don’t think we really look alike but there must be some kind of resemblance because we often got mistaken.

I get mistaken for my twin.

I was walking through town and this woman gave me an over familiar, really loud hello.
I was hi in return.

My sister had been with him 3 years

Alison. Yeah, me neither.

In the late1980's, I was a 15 year old on a shopping trip to the next big town on the bus. A few friends and I had recently finished out GSCEs and were going to visit a friend who had recently moved away.
The bus stopped at a local market town and pupils from the local school got on.
After a few minutes I noticed them turning round and looking at us (we were on the back row of the top deck, cos we were cool ). A few more minutes later one came over and asked me if I was a famous pop star (not saying who as very outing- all my friends know this story). I looked nothing like her- just vaguely similar hair. I said 'yes in my best sarcastic teenage voice because the thought of this famous pop star, who was from a different country, would be on a bus in rural England was just too ridiculous an idea to me! The boy went back to his friends and returned with a pen and paper for my 'autograph' which I gave him! I'm not sure if I even spelt her name correctly.
The friends who I was with called me by her name for the duration of that summer....

I should have said it was my sister's boyfriend's mother

I constantly get mistaken for my colleague. She has a strong northern accent, I'm home counties, she's twice my size and weight, She has short dark hair, I have long blond hair.
I'm pissed off with it, everyone needs to go to specsavers.