To get so irritated when people pretend things happened to them that clearly didn't?

[CalamityKate]

I was watching This Morning earlier and they had an email from a woman who trotted out the whole "Dug Up Rabbit" story. Of course Colleen and Ruth and Eammon had a right old laugh about it.

Which is lovely, but it didn't happen. It's an urban myth that's been repeated and repeated and repeated - often by celebrities on chat shows.

Snopes

It REALLY irritates me when people do this. Why lie? What on earth is the point of emailing a programme, pretending that something happened to you when it didn't?

I've seen it on forums too - people tell a story that is either clearly a lie (as in the Snopes example) or it just doesn't ring true and you just KNOW it's either completely made up or VERY heavily embellished.

I was actually tempted to email This Morning

I don't get the la-a one?

"So no-one else has ever told someone in RL about a MN thread, with the OP described vaguely as a friend" then?"

I always preface with 'I read somewhere...' Never say where. If pressed would probably say Take a Break

I am extremely miffed by the M&S.spider one....a member of staff once blagged a day off using this, and I bloody well fell for it. It was circa 1993 so no chance his mums duvet was the original by the looks of it!

Ahhhh - Flying and Eighties - you are right - it was Going Too Far - the sequel to TOGN - still featuring Polly Esther though......

When I was a 6th form I had a friend who was like this. We used to buy magazines and leave them round the common room. Once she told me a story using a phrase word for word from one of the magazines. I then started to doubt that she actually had any original thoughts but instead was just living in a virtual reality world she'd cobbled together from TV and magazines.

I very briefly dated a guy who insisted that he had been bitten by a spider (or something) on his leg while he was in Africa and when he came home it was getting bigger and itchy etc and one day it just popped and all these little spiders/other wriggly things came out and it turned out that it had actually laid eggs inside his leg. One of the many reasons why we only dated briefly!

Shush La-a = Ladasha

The Jenny Taylor thing is why I'd never take DP's name if we ever get married....

Also, a Uni friend told me the smear story in about 1995. Except it happened to her, and with a bus ticket. I'm disappointed now.

Oh but Jenstar then we could all say that we 'know' someone called Jenny Taylor! :)

I went on a training course and there was quite a good motivational type speaker. Unfortunately he ended by telling this story of the dad with the badly behaved children on tne underground who when challenged by other passengers said his wife had just died and he hadn't yet told them. The speaker made out he had witnessed it himself and it had had a profound effect on him etc etc.

Unfortunately a previous speaker had used the same anecdote the day before. Turned out to be a crap course with crap speakers. There's a week of my life I will never get back.

I haven't heard the "wife has died and the children don't know" story, but surely that should only work as an excuse if they did know. Otherwise, they are behaving as normally aren't they?

I have heard and 'believed' the La-a story (believed as in not thought about or cared about it enough to question it).

And I still maintain that the woman whose Daily Mail story was linked on here and who called her child DKNY should pronounce it as Dickney. And that one has to be true, it was in the DM with a photo.

NOGTEYE Yes, it doesn't actually make sense!

And yes, the DM never lies to us

I'm a student midwife and I did once (doing an antenatal clinic last Jan) have a lady gigglingly hand me her urine sample apologising for its sparkliness but she'd forgotten she was wearing her Christmas glittery knickers, so I always find the glitter/fanjo stories quite plausible!

I fell for the rabbit story on this morning yesterday!

I have a terrible memory and can't remember where I've heard things. So rather than risk being caught repeating a Take a Break story as my own I just start with 'I heard somewhere . . . .'

I do genuinely know a Jenny Taylor though. A friend knows someone called Shirley who married someone with the surname Shirley (or am I being gullible?)

I was flicking through this collection of witty replies this morning and it has one where a club member relates a hoary old anecdote to a venerable club member, finishing with 'And the extraordinary thing is, it happened to my father!'
The venerable member replies 'And the even more extraordinary thing is, I seem to have met at least twenty of your brothers....'

nothing new under the sun and all that....

re the 'wife has died and the children don't know' story, it does work, because the children might well react badly to a sense that something is wrong without knowing what, and the dad would likely be too knocked sideways to bother making them behave as you usually would on a train.

some of these are believable - I've read Harry Potter books in under three hours, if you use speed reading techniques it is easy.

I've also known of dogs so well trained that they would not touch steak without permission.

"that's a variation on when Helen and Rupert sleep together for the first time in Riders and she's used hairspray instead of deodorant... "

• I always thought that scene was him objecting to her vaginal deodorant, saying that's what it seemed like (coz hes so English and red-blooded and doesn't know anything about these poncy American inventions, dontcha know) and not a mix up on her part.

< resets Jilly batphone for next time >

I said that already - she was deliberately using some kind of weird vaginal deodorant. The implication is that she is a prude, I think.

wanking teenagers and cup of tea.

when i was a teenager, i used to "mess around" with a young man. his bedroom had the airing cupboard in it, and many times his mum would knock on the door to enter when we were mid steamy snog.
that's as close as i can come to that one! but god it was embarrassing!

What really winds me up is when these urban myths with the scare mongering tone whiz round as emails with the note above, "This happened to a friend of mine so you must take it seriously". And it's the old "if you flash your lights at a car with no lights on at night, it's a gang initiation" or the "in pub xxx [insert name of local] girls are being abducted but it's not public as the police are keeping it quiet..." Thing. And people believe it.

Because of SIL's job, DH always believed her when she sent this stuff round. But she was just naive. I had to send her snopes eventually a I couldn't take the inbox clogging up anymore!

I worked in an office that was awash with urban legends. One girl in particular seemed to know a lot of most unfortunate people - the Kentucky Fried Rat, the tumour-burger, the kidneys removed in the hotel bathroom, the chloroform/perfume spray, spiders in a Sainsbury's banana, the petrol forecourt... I tend to sigh inwardly when I hear 'but the police are hushing it up so as not to cause panic'.

BlingLoving - those emails wind me up! So tired of the "flash your lights" one, what about the person who sits next to you at the movies and injects you with some virus in a syringe - really!