A brace of liars
Two of my former colleagues in different jobs were addicted to bullshitting, albeit in different ways.

Ed was a black American guy I met in London. He was one of those 'life of the party' types, always ready with a joke or an anecdote to sugar the prospect of spending eight hours in a stuffy office. He was actually a pretty gifted liar, as he understood perfectly that every good lie must be at least vaguely plausible. His gospel truths included:

- he needed to go to hospital to have an injection that would stop him losing all his blackness and turning into a white man. Throw in a few words like 'melanin' and 'Michael Jackson' and you're away;
- he used to be fluent in Ancient Greek and Portuguese, but he forgot them. In their entirety.;
- he owned a collection of Magic The Gathering cards worth over $20,000. Again, faintly believable but he mentioned Magic a grand total of once in the three years I knew him so I don't think he was that big a fan.

Calling him out was a bit of a shame, as it meant exposing his pretty pathetic existence to the sunlight. He claimed to be a god of IT, yet within a month or two of my arrival people started coming to me with their IT problems rather than to him, despite the fact that I'd had no specialist training. He claimed to be bosom buddies with all the senior account executives in America, yet when they all came over for a big meeting in London he was basically told to take them all out for dinner and drinks and put it all on his personal credit card. "Oh yeah, Ed, don't worry: you can claim it back on expenses later." Good luck with that one, mate.

Dave was a different breed. I met him when I worked in direct sales, and I think he was a true pathological liar: he would lie without the faintest consideration of whether what he was saying was believable; and he would lie when there was no advantage or point whatsoever in doing so. We had an office sweepstake on who would win the World Cup; one morning, in the middle of a meeting, he announced "Oh, I've won the World Cup competition, by the way." Six weeks before the final. Back when he joined the company, before any of us worked there of course, and it was more like he jointly set it up with the big boss because they were best mates, he hurt his knee and couldn't go out in the field for weeks, so his boss/mate paid him to sit in the office and play on the PlayStation the whole time. This, in an office where people were fired for coming in half an hour late and for getting their hair cut on company time (10:00 to 22:00).

I miss Ed; he was a laugh. Dave was a cunt.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 14 Jan 2011, 12:29, Reply)