What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve bullshitted someone into believing?
When me and my siblings were much younger my dad owned a Volvo car with a computerized voice. It was a very deep voice that would give you warnings about the car’s status. “The boot (trunk) is not shut” being one I remember. Very creepy now I look back at it.
Me, my older brother and our dad would joke that the voice came from “a little man” inside the car. My younger sister was at an age where you could tell her anything and she would take it as gospel. She actually believed there was a tiny person with an extraordinarily deep voice living in the car. We kept it going for a long time until one day someone crashed into the vehicle and it ended up in the scrapyard. As she cried for the safety of the little man we had to tell her the truth. She was mad at us for weeks.
I convinced my kids that my car’s triangular, red, hazard button was a ‘self destruct’ button. This was initially to keep them from hitting it since it is a really prominently placed, large, red button. This worked out great until I quickly pulled the car over the other day to get a dog off the road. Threw on my hazards and jumped out of the car after the dog. I looked back and both kids are hitting the ditch.
Dealing with that kind of betrayal must have been hard for them. “Dad hit the self-destruct and ran away!!!”
Dad killed a dog, hit self-destruct on the car to remove all evidence and witnesses and ran away.
SHIT
I once briefly convinced a significant portion of my readership that it was possible to “win” Tetris.
i used to have this friend who fancied himself Very Intellectual and we used to have these – idk what to call them – book critic dates? but they weren’t dates, he was either resentfully straight or pathologically closeted and i wasn’t about to fuck with that – anyway, we’d hang out and talk literature, him doing sincere self-backpats and me subtly messing with him… it was a weird friendship.
anyhow, one time we did this at the park, and when we were done with our picnic we gathered up everything but one soda can. our hands were full and this empty can was left.
i said casually, “leave it, squirrels will eat it,” and walked away. i was just being a smartass and leaving him to juggle baggage, but he completely believed me.
i convinced a 20-something intellectual that squirrels eat aluminum cans.
