I was very cheekily forwarded an email promoting the latest chick-lit release. It was a cheeky email, since it was sent to everyone on the First Time Club mailing list without first having asked permission from the admin, and that just wasn't on. Anyway, the book sounds like the usual dull and uninteresting tripe that is aimed at people who don't like to read or have no imaginations. But what was interesting was how they are promoting it. With a PR background, the promoting of a product interests me more than the product itself a lot of the time.
To promote the book, a competition is being run to win a weekend away -- the prize going to the person who submits the best story of a lie they have told.
I submitted a true story dating back to the Christmas of 2006, when some friends and I were at a very bad Christmas disco held at a boat club in the middle of nowhere and DJ'd by the half-deaf and slightly retarded older brother of a guy we had gone to school with and didn't really like. Sounds like the recipe for a great night, doesn't it?
The main point of my story -- both here where I first told and on the entry from -- was fairly simple, At the party I had got talking to a woman who was the Mum of a girl I had gone to school with. Her daughter was now a successful lawyer, living in LA. I thought what did I do for a living? I worked in a call centre and felt like a loser.
That's more or less where the real story parts ways with the version I submitted. Like the charming British Government's reports on WMD in Iraq, I wanted to sex it up a bit. In my submitted version of the story, I decided I should have told the woman I was an artist/sculptor (I don't think she ever asked), what's more that I was flirting with this girl's Mum, and that at the end of the night I gave her my phone number on the pretence of her giving it to her daughter but knowing she'd keep it.
One story wasn't enough though. So from a different email address I submitted the story of my imaginary girlfriend -- but again it wasn't quite good enough, so I tacked onto the end of the story being offered the job, but later breaking up with my imaginary girlfriend while she was teaching English abroad.
I think I should get extra credit for not only telling (to my mind) entertaining stories about lies I told, but actually lying about it.
Interestingly, the website for the book and the competition no longer loads, so I wonder if someone got into trouble for the spamming of the link...
Too funny. I still think the imaginary girlfriend stories is one of the funniest things I've ever read, anywhere. Shame you didn't get the job in the end, I would have loved to see how you dealt with that little lie long term.
ReplyDeleteha! I totally agree with amanda - would have loved to see how you dealt with that lie in an office environment :D And yes, you should have gotten extra credit!
ReplyDeleteYou should definitely have won the competition based on the fact that you lied about a story about telling lies. Perfection!
ReplyDeleteAmanda: It was easy enough to deal with long-term, first my imaginary girlfriend was training as a teacher -- they never asked where at the time, so I would have made it somewhere up north. Then, she would have moved to Japan, and shortly thereafter we would have broken up. So there!
ReplyDeleteMez: See above for the cunning plan to deal with unwanted imaginary partners, and the trouble is I can only get that extra credit if they know...
Dune: I'll let you know if I do win it -- and then, when I collect my prize, I will tell them it was a lie!