Rigorous Honesty

I heard the same story three times. Twice in phone calls and then face-to-face to someone in person. It was the same story, but subtly different each time it was told. And not told afresh in a way to make it more clear but twisted and details altered to achieve a different response from the listener.

The guy was sitting at a table behind me in a coffee shop. I wasn't watching him, just listening in between trying to do what I was supposed to be doing.

It seems he'd flown in from Chicago to stay with someone here but had lost her address, she was on her way back from Hong Kong and wasn't answering his messages. So he had to stay in a hotel an extra night. But they'd given him a room with a window that opened onto an alleyway, which wasn't a problem in itself, except that "some idiot" decided to light a fire in the alleyway and that filled his room with smoke. After it had cleared, he was so stressed that he had to go out onto the little balcony and have a cigarette, but that was the moment that room service arrived and they said that they would have to fine him for smoking in his room. His husband, Tony, back in Chicago could have given him this girl's address too, but he went out on a bender and was incoherently drunk when he'd called. His drinking is "tearing our lives apart". So to make up for it, he emptied the minibar himself and managed to check out without the hotel charging him. It may be that the girl arriving from Hong Kong had lost her phone, or she'd got a new one and had been locked out of Facebook because she couldn't remember her password.

The first time he told this story was to a friend in America who had actually been out drinking with Tony last night. The second time was with Tony himself. The third time was to a random person who'd just walked in and made the mistake of looking sympathetic and had been dragged into the drama themselves.

Now I'm not here to judge this guy. As someone who habitually bent the truth to my own ends like this (although maybe not as loudly, or in public) for many years, I could only cringe with identification. I know that when you're in that habit, it seems like the only way to get people's attention or to get your own way is to jazz your story up a little. It's not dishonesty, it's embellishment... When you're in it, it's completely normal.

But no, there were lies in there, there were things that were made up and there were bits that didn't get mentioned in one version of the story because they didn't suit being said to the person he was talking to at that time. And that's only the bits that I could detect from sitting half way across a coffee shop trying to work on something else but with a deep familiarity with dishonest behaviour in myself and others. Who knows what else was going on, or how the story mutated next time it was told.

I work now on not doing this (yeah, instead I turn other people's drama into blog posts - so sue me), not because I think I'm any better than anyone else, but because it just makes life much simpler. I don't have to remember what I said to whom, or deal with the upset when people find you've been lying to them. It can be tough, because who cares about little white lies? But nope, I have to do my best to tell the truth and deal with the consequences.