Faking It

I have to admit I am actually deaf. Every post on ILM is actually a joke. ;-) Seriously though, yeah, loads of times. Heck, I'm in SALES. People want to believe you. That's what I discovered ages ago.

I've been faking it on the dancefloor for years now.

I bullshitted my way into a job at an offset printing company a couple years ago without knowing a damn thing about it. Since the department I moved into was in a shambles and the head of it was on vacation when I started, I was able to teach myself everything I needed to know in the time it would've taken them to realize I didn't know anything.

Working in the bookshop of course brilliantly combined stuff that was 'cultural' AND 'at work', as the main requirement was to be less full of shit than the customers (not that difficult).

My current job needs a bit of fakery, but going to work in a 'Technical Systems' department of a market research firm when I'd never even used a spreadsheet before required sustained lying over a good six months. Luckily all our programs were written in-house by somebody too high-up to take any flak so they could be blamed for anything.

I was once wondering around and looking lost in an area of the university not well known to me, when a couple of flaxen haired students came up to me and said: "Are you looking for the Scandinavian Society drinks?" With no hesitation, I said yes.

The room thronged with national stereotypes like a cheap fifties comedy. I was offered a drink, and then accosted in a foreign language by a girl with a Swedish flag on her lapel. "Sorry," I said, "I'm Danish."

She spoke politely to me in English, a language we both knew of course, and then led me to a gentleman with a Danish flag. He refilled my drink, and then spoke equally unintelligibly. "Sorry," I said, "I'm Swedish."

After a few drinks, everyone was talking in English, and I spent two hours quaffing their viscous yellow wine, happily recounting tales of my home town in Jutland or Stockholm, as appropriate.

he's not - yr funny!

Magnus, I sense you may have something to offer on the Recreational Lying thread.

A current flatmate is the most inveterate pseudo-intellectual bullshitter I've ever seen, and he never even once has admitted to being out of his depth. I asked him his favorite films, he said "Definitely something by Kieslowski, and Kurosawa would have to be in there." I quizzed him about various films by these two, and he hadn't seen any.
This same individual was the inspiration for the 'Talking over the TV' thread - once he launched into a dissertation on postwar American literature while I was trying to watch Big Brother, and when I asked him what he thought of Mailer, he couldn't name a single title. Best of all, he once told me his musical taste leaned towards "things with depth and creativity - like jazz, I'm WELL into it", and he didn't know who Charlie Parker was. None of this has stopped him from lecturing the rest of the household in exasperated tones about our lowbrow taste.

This man sounds a riot. Can you get him to join ILE?

i don't pretend to know more about something than i actually do, but anyone who has seen LD50 knows that i can't play guitar. i don't even do a very convincing job of pretending to be able to play.