To ask if anyone has ever met a Walter Mitty type character?

[Mrspoopoohead]

Just that really it always amazes me to hear how people manage to get jobs impersonating doctors for example. Has anyone had any real life experiences?

They never called him out though as he was a good story teller and it sounded better than Grandad remembered it

That made me laugh and I think your in-laws must be very nice people

Yes. Someone my family knew who'd suffered a lot of abuse and neglect in their early life. They never spoke about that but they did have Munchausen's syndrome so lots of visits to lots of hospitals. They also pretended they were a paramedic and that they'd been in the forces. It was very sad but you really couldn't believe anything they said.

@ToddlerTrainer

NC. Yes, a prep school headmaster. He had manufactured an upper crust accent and persona but actually came from very humble beginnings. He charmed or at least convinced most people but was outed as a thief, bully and serial cheat and quietly made to move on - twice. I think somewhere even employed him again, although as a teacher not a head.

I am wondering if this is my kids old headmaster. Was he in Hertfordshire?

@MNWorldisCrazy

No, it was a passenger jet He also claimed he could pierce a matchbox with a throwing knife from 30 feet and other such impossible bollocks.

Yes, my husband's x-wife, she's a compulsive liar but makes a living out of it as a tabloid journalist 😆😬

Loving the story about someone telling the lie that they had shat themselves!

Someone needs lessons on "lying to impress."

When I was in my early 20s I dated an older guy.

To this day I’m not entirely sure what was the truth and what was a lie.

It was only after I settled down with my now DH that I remembered the ex saying to me, ‘I’m a Walter Mitty c*nt’.

At the time he said it I didn’t know who Walter Mitty was . Far too young, naive and stupid.

I came across something I was reading that night many years on about Walter Mitty and then this huge flashback of thoughts came back and I realised it’s likely he lied to me about a lot of things. I was just gobsmacked.

He claimed to have been in the Parachute regiment (something about being elite).

Long story short, he had a kid (nothing wrong with that but could have mentioned him at some point) and he wasn’t married (I think he was because one day he turned up with a ring on and told me it was because of his job he had to look like he had a family).

Eventually I somehow managed to find out through his emails that he was part of a swingers website. He was doing pretty much everything that was available to tick on the ‘what are you into?’ Options section.

I confronted him and he denied it even though I’d changed his password and he was trying to get it back. I just wanted the truth and once I gave him his password he went back to denying it and said he didn’t know what I was talking about.

A year or two on we spoke and he said he was training as a nurse to work at the same unit Ian Brady was being kept at.

I don’t know if this is a lie or the truth.

I still don’t know if he was married but I suspect he was because he was shady with phone calls and texts and coming to meet me. Though at the time I 100% believed I was the only woman in his life.

I do still wonder every now and again what the truth is but I will never know!

I forgot to say!

The bit about the parachute regiment- he would tell me stories about Afghanistan. What they did

When I dated another guy after him, this new guy also was in the parachute regiment .

At some point I realised saying you’re in the parachute regiment was equivalent to a teenager saying ‘when I grow up I want to be a famous popstar’

Not to my knowledge, @Doggley - further north.

I worked with someone who has lied about virtually every member of their family dying. They're clearly very mentally unwell. The company supported them, but it was sad to see.

I had a boss who lied about everything. Absolutely everything.

I worked for a charitable foundation, and she once fabricated an entire corporate sponsorship deal with Pfizer - talked about a series of lectures and events she was planning to put on with them, presented on it in team meetings...and then when the events didn't materialize, she claimed Pfizer pulled out, when she'd never even spoken to them.

She also went on a lot of fake business trips to secure corporate gifts, none of which ever materialized. She also lied and said she went to Cambridge, when she'd actually just gone to a conference there one summer. One of her best ones was when she was at an event with one of my colleagues and they spent some time having a totally innocuous conversation with a couple of donors...then by boss goes around telling everyone that they propositioned her for a threesome.

She also told lots of little lies - she'd lie about which hotel she was staying in on a business trip, even if you were on the trip with her. She claimed to have an internet famous dog when the dog was not famous, and belonged to her sister. She once claimed that she never approved my Christmas holiday to go and see my parents...when I had the paperwork proving that she had. She was so adamant that I had to go to HR to be allowed to take the holiday at all.

@Doggley I knew someone like that too, but in Berkshire/Oxfordshire.

He and his wife now run an educational consultancy with posh fake names.

I have just watched an episode of Midsomer Murders, which featured a Walt. He was caught out because a detail was missing from a medal he was wearing in a photograph. (Yes, I know it was fiction.)

My brother's friend "Fred".

Fred had no apparent health or mobility concerns, worked as a postman and also spent a lot of time with my brother enjoying a hobby for which you needed to be physically fit.

We'd known Fred as almost part of our family for some years when out of the blue his photo appeared in our local paper. In the photo he was in a wheelchair at the local sports club for people with disabilities. With it was an article describing his sporting achievements. It was a touching story of a person overcoming health obstacles and continuing to enjoy sport despite his significant health problems.

As he was a local postman in a small town a good few of the population knew him by sight and someone got in touch with the paper. The paper investigated and published a subsequent article.

He'd apparently been turning up at the club for a number of years pretending to be disabled and competing against genuinely disabled people. He'd been very thorough in his deception and no one suspected he was faking. He'e even gone as far as to fall out of his wheelchair a number of times and had been assisted back into his chair by a number of helpers.

I was only a child at the time and couldn't grasp that adults could lie like that.

This was many years before "Little Britain" by the way but when I first saw the Andy character there was a definite pang of recognition.

They even looked similar.

Wow at Fred! !!