The Posthumous Reveal
I worked with this guy once who was known for his stories. No matter how loose the connection was, he’d find a way to turn anything into a personal anecdote of a thing he’d seen or done before.
All of them were interesting the first time (he’d lived an interesting life – grown up in America, moved to Australia in his early 20s, worked in a lot of really cool places over the years), but it wasn’t long before he started repeating the same stories over and over again.
I worked with him for just over three years, so it got pretty ridiculous. We knew how he’d met his wife, all the obscure things he owned, his pets, his kids – we knew every detail of his life. It became a bit of an in-joke within the office about how the guy never shut up.
Then one day, he didn’t come in. He’d died of a heart attack. The whole office was at a loss, especially our little department (which had about 8 people in it, including him). When it came to his funeral, our little group took the afternoon off and attended. And that’s how we found out, none of his stories were true.
He’d grown up locally, his family wasn’t at all who we thought they were, none of his old jobs had happened… Everything we’d known about him had just been made up.
The most interesting thing for me was that at one point, our boss needed someone to head to China to double check something in person at one of our company’s factories. When the usual choices couldn’t do it, he was picked.
It seemed like a no brainier, since he was regularly going to and from America to visit family and had travelled a lot on his other jobs. We now think that may have been his first time overseas. Story credit: Reddit / chiiild