Let's talk about how this story of a guy supposedly buying every pie Burger King had left is a complete lie. (Why I Hate People)

One thing I hate about people is when they do stuff.  Or, more accurately, when they say they did stuff.  If you listen to call-in radio shows, or read many websites like Reddit, or ever even glanced at Dear Prudie on Slate (the latter of which is entirely made up of entirely-made-up problems and stories) you will quickly realize that nearly every single story every single person tells is, if not 100% bunk, then... well, no, they're 100% bunk.

"Dear Prudie,
Recently my [category of currently-hot social trend in dating, such as 'gay husband' or 'Mormon boyfriend']
said that he wanted to [combine a food or drink with a 1950s dating ritual] but I am worried because my
[somewhat distant relative like an Aunt or perhaps stepchild] walked in on us while we were
[inverted verb], and now I don't know what to tell my [coworker or boss because this somehow ended up on Facebook,"
PS This letter is [write the words 'totally not fake"]
Signed, ________________

The problem is, I think, that people want their stories to be interesting but most of us don't really lead lives that are interesting, so when it comes to telling stories, you could do one of two things:

A. You could lead a more interesting life, like go sky-diving or invent hydrogen or something, or
B. You could find a way to tell about your boring life in an interesting way, at least.

Confronted with those two options, 100% of the people who tell stories that I hear or read opt for

C. LIE THE CRAP OUT OF THINGS.

They embellish their lives, invent details, or simply flat-out make up a story, whether that story be a fake 'scavenger hunt break-up letter,' or a spurious claim that one kept a cheeseburger in one's pocket for 14 years. And you can always always tell that these stories are made up, not that the Internet and its echo chamber of faux-news operations (and real news operations that can't tell the difference between an Onion headline and what Obama actually did) care about it: if something is on the Internet, the rush to point out that it is on the Internet takes precedence over determining whether it is true.

Take the Guy Who Bought The Pies, a story that I saw on Gawker this morning:

Man Buys Every Pie at Local Burger King to Spite Shitty Little Brat

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Dayna Evans

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Dayna Evans

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• KIDS
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Wednesday 4:09pm

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Kids are annoying no matter how you slice it, but if they are crying their heads off and yelling "I want fucking pie!" when you're in line at a Burger King, the only natural recourse is to then buy every single pie in sight so that the kid just has to fucking deal. One man, a Gawker hero, claims on Reddit to have done just that.

In a Reddit thread labeled "offmychest," one user spins a compelling tale of buying 23 Burger King apple pies when he heard a young crybaby behind him yelling at his mother about wanting some fucking pie. What happens next will surprise and gratify you!!!!!!

From his Reddit confession:

It turns out it was so slow because they had 1 trainee on cash during the lunch hour rush. All I can think of is how the people behind me ruined my splurge and gave me this headache. I then decide to ruin their day. I order every pie they have left in addition to my burgers. Turned out to be 23 pies in total, I take my order and walk towards the exit. Moments later I hear the woman yelling, what do you mean you don't have any pies left, who bought them all? I turn around and see the cashier pointing me out with the woman shooting me a death glare. I stand there and pull out a pie and slowly start eating eat as I stare back at her. She starts running towards me but can't get to me because of other lineups in the food court. I turn and slowly walk away.

The man with the most pies and least crying kids in his face wins.

____________________________________________________________

I read that because of the headline -- I'm always curious as to whether a kid is really "shitty" or if it's just some idiot adult who for some reason is swimming in a family pool meant for kids but doesn't feel as though kids should be there,  -- and quickly realized that the entire thing is fiction, and not very good fiction, at that.

Let's walk it through to see why this guy is clearly lying.  (He took down the post on Reddit because so many people accused him of lying, but that didn't stop Gawker from reposting this as a thing that was true, because Gawker does that, and in fact Gawker declared the author of this fictional piece their "hero.")

First off, you don't get a name, or location?  The Gawker article doesn't have one, and I couldn't find any article that did.  So this guy is either so important or so afraid of the repercussions of posting this that he can't give any identifying information by which this could be tracked?  For Pete's sake, Edward Snowden gave his name.  Is this guy more important or in more danger than Edward Snowden?  Any anonymous story that does not involve revealing that Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush  have a death ray poised over Tulsa is a fake story.

Second, where's the evidence? This is the era of smart phones with cameras, and hence pictures of food and receipts and restaurants.  Everyone who does something they think is cool in a restaurant snaps a picture of it, but this guy (who is tech-savvy enough to post on Reddit) didn't bother getting a picture of his 23 pies, or the crowded food court, or even the receipt showing that he purchased 23 pies?

One-quarter of all server space in the
world is taken up with images of
fast-food receipts. Fast-food receipts
are quickly replacing porn as the
majority of information on the Internet.
When they develop "Fast Food Receipt Porn,"
the world will end.

Third, consider the details.  Let's assume a Burger King in a crowded food court really does have a trainee "on cash," which is not a thing people say, during the lunch rush.  That could happen (it didn't, but is at least theoretically possible, unlike the rest of this story).  Here is the guy's whole story from the Reddit post

So a while ago I had decided to treat myself and go to Burger King. I hadn't had the greatest of days and I had a headache coming on. It was a very long line and I was at the end of it waiting patiently. When behind me comes this woman yapping on her cellphone with a little monster of a child. This kid was out of control, screaming, punching his mother throwing around a gameboy whenever something didn't go right in the game. The mother didn't seem to pay any attention to him and his continued yelling of 'I want a Fucking PIE'. After about 5 minutes of the line with these people behind me, I had gone from a headache to a full on migraine, but nothing was going to stop me from getting those burgers. I calmly turn and ask her nicely if she can please calm or quiet her child down. Immediately she gets up in my face telling me I can't tell her nothing about raising her child and to mind my own business. I nod and turn around, shes still yelling at the back of my head when the child cries out again how he wants a pie, the mother consoles him, calling him sweety and ensuring they'll get pies for lunch because she loves him so much. Things immediately go back to the they were and I wait another 5 minutes before getting to the front of the line. It turns out it was so slow because they had 1 trainee on cash during the lunch hour rush. All I can think of is how the people behind me ruined my splurge and gave me this headache. I then decide to ruin their day. I order every pie they have left in addition to my burgers. Turned out to be 23 pies in total, I take my order and walk towards the exit. Moments later I hear the woman yelling, what do you mean you don't have any pies left, who bought them all? I turn around and see the cashier pointing me out with the woman shooting me a death glare. I stand there and pull out a pie and slowly start eating eat as I stare back at her. She starts running towards me but can't get to me because of other lineups in the food court. I turn and slowly walk away.

Let's also assume this guy was in fact the soul of politeness as the kid threw around the Game Boy and Mo yapped on her cell phone. (Game Boys aren't made any more, though, so keep that suspension of disbelief working; apparently Mom is raising a retrogamer.)

Here's a problem: the mom and kid are right behind the guy, who stands there and orders every pie they have.  But neither Mom nor kid hear him do this? What, did the guy whisper?  "Psst don't tell awful mom behind me but I would like every pie you have."

AND, Mom and kid do not see the sole trainee "on cash" loading up 23 pies for this guy into a bag or on a tray? That is probably because they are so distracted by the fact that they can only afford toys made in 1997.

This guy then manages to order 23 pies, get them put on a tray or in a bag, pay for them, carry several bags worth of pies away from the counter through a crowded food court, (kudos to him for doing that all with a "migraine," because when my mom used to get migraines she spent 2 days in a dark room throwing up, not dispensing appley-delicious justice at the local mall), all without Mom and kid noticing, but is still able to hear the Mom demanding to know what happened to all the pies, in the least credible way possible:

I hear the woman yelling what do you mean you don't have any pies left who bought them all?

That is not a thing people say.  Have you been in a restaurant that ran out of things? Remember, Mom's bewilderment means she did not know Reddit Guy bought them all.  Which makes her question very strange.  I was in Panera the other day, and they had run out of coffee (side note: Panera exists to sell coffee.  This store was not fulfilling its basic function as a thing. That is another reason I hate people).  When I learned that they were (temporarily) out of coffee, I didn't say "What? Who bought all the coffee?" I simply said "Oh.  Okay,  I will wait."  I did that because I am a real person in real life, not a made-up person in a story on the Internet.

What really might have happened is the trainee "on cash" would have said "Oh, we're out of them it'll be a few minutes for those we have to cook some more," which is something that actually happens/gets said at fast food restaurants which have temporarily run out of something here in this universe where things are real and fast food restaurants have food which they can cook and serve to people.  Or are we to believe that Reddit Guy bought every pie in the store, even the frozen ones in the walk in? 

Perhaps.  Because in Fake News Gawker Hero Land, what supposedly happens is the trainee "on cash", points out the offender, doing so even though this person is so befuddled by his/her job that he/she cannot even wait on people in a timely fashion, not even those people who are in a hurry to splurge before migraines set in.  This trainee, so poorly skilled in the work required to be "on cash" (and apparently unaware that Burger King can simply cook more food) is nonetheless able to keep track of where prior customers went in a crowded food court, and accurately point them out as the offender who has bought every single thing this Burger King ever had, possibly even the chairs.

Gawker's Hero is not fazed by being outed, though. In fact, he's so unfazed that he doesn't bother to explain why he's still paying attention to Mom's conversation and is close enough to hear them.  Maybe he waited around to find out what happened, the way serial killers will stand at the crime scene or dogs will eat their own vomit?  Anyway, Gawker's Hero Reddit Guy is so unfazed that when pointed out as the Pie Bandit, he calmly pulls out a pie and starts eating it.

So:

What did he do with the burgers and the other 22 pies he was holding?

Don't those pies come in boxes or wraps? Did he (in a crowded food court) juggle several bags of splurgerific Burger King pies while also unwrapping the pie and eating it slowly to taunt the woman (while suffering from a migraine, no less!)?

...to taunt the woman who not only immediately abandons her kid to attack him but is somehow completely unable to negotiate this crowded food court?

start eating eat as I stare back at her. She starts running towards me but can't get to me because of other lineups in the food court.

So to be clear:

1. Trainee "on cash" points out Gawker Hero, who is at least two "lineups" (i.e. other restaurants in the food court) away.
2. After being pointed out, Gawker Hero has time to unwrap and slowly start eating a pie while also engaging in a staring contest.
3. Woman only then starts running at him.
4. "Other lineups" close ranks and cut this woman off entirely, doing so so effectively that...
5. ...Gawker Hero can "turn and slowly walk away."

And woman can do nothing!

It could only be more perfect if the Burger King was exploding behind him.

Actual footage of Gawker Hero (22 remaining pies not pictured.)

Gawker is a gossip site, and is mostly filled up these days with stories about how cool the Gawker people think the Gawker people are, so it's not as though they've committed some kind of serious journalistic infraction here.  You have to be a journalist, first.  But if Gawker is going to name an author of a fictional piece their hero, they could at least pick a good author of a good fictional piece.

The Best Job To Dream Of Having When You Get A Little Tired Of Having Your Own Job (Me, Annotated)

Here's a post I wrote on The Best Of Everything back on August 8, 2008.  The stuff that's in red is what I think now about what I thought then.

The Best Job To Dream Of Having When You Get A Little Tired Of Having Your Own Job

Sometimes, I have to take a break from blogging and writing and watching "The Airborne Toxic Event" acoustic videos on Youtube and wondering if they took their name from M. Night Shymalan's crummy movie The Happening, or if he took his "ideas" for that terrible movie from the band's name, or if there was some actual "airborne toxic event" that inspired both the awful movie and the pretty good band...

Sometimes, I have to stop doing all that and "work." Yesterday was one of those days, when, wearing a tie and looking sharp, I had to attend a court hearing on behalf of a client, driving 1 and 1/2 hours one way to get there, only to meet with the judge and learn that due to a busy calendar, the judge was not prepared to issue a ruling that day and needed a few more months.

The judge, a very nice guy, sighed and mentioned that his workload was so overwhelming that if it didn't get better, he might give it up and just drive a truck.

That's a pretty drastic shift-- go from sentencing criminals and ruling on divorces to sitting in a semi, hauling cheese or nuclear weapons across the US -- but one that I understand, because who doesn't get tired, occasionally (or more than occasionally) of their job and dream of switching to a new job, one that doesn't have all the crummy features of the job we are (at least temporarily) sick of, and has all sorts of imagined great features. In the Judge's case, he mentioned that truck driving had its appeal because he "likes to read." I gathered that he felt that driving a big rig would give him plenty of time to get caught up on books and magazines.

It only just occurred to me that you could read that sentence as meaning "get caught up... while driving," but that's obviously not what the judge meant, or so I hope.  I think what he was really getting after was that truck driving, like many jobs, has a definite beginning and end point of each day, whereas jobs like lawyer and judge do not.  As I say often to my younger employees, there is no point of the day at which I am done.  Instead, there is just a time at which I stop working and go do something else.  And that is every day of your life if you are a lawyer: even when you finish one thing, there are other things to finish.  I suppose it's like that for every job.  Truck drivers finish a route and then start the next.  But it seems different, and so what I suppose the judge really meant was that at the end of a  day of truck driving he could pull the truck over and read a good book without feeling like he was hurting someone by not ruling on their case or doing a bit more research into something. 

I could sympathize; who couldn't? There's almost always something we don't like about our jobs, and some days, a job is made up entirely of things that we don't like about our jobs. It's on those days that we dream about switching, and we dream about switching to whatever job that day seems to have only good stuff associated with it, or at least to completely lack all the bad stuff associated with the day we're having.

The jobs we imagine we'd like when we don't like our current jobs offer a sort of peripheral glimpse into our minds, showing not just what we don't like about our own job, but how little we know about any other job and what it is we'd rather be doing. Here are a sampling of the actual jobs that I've, at times, thought that I would rather have than my current "actual" job of lawyer:

Bartender.
Sitcom writer.
Ice cream shop owner.
Janitor.
Sports talk radio guy.
Shark scientist.

That latter one first came up only recently, when I was watching a bit of a shark documentary on cable and noticed that the shark scientists dressed like beach bums and spent a lot of their days on the beach talking about sharks. That seemed to me to be a pretty good life, although it would have its downside, that being that they also went swimming at night in water that had been prebaited with rotten fish and was swarming with tiger sharks.

Still beats talking to other lawyers.*
*Note: Not a joke. I'm serious.

I think it's telling that, under pressure when I don't like something about my current job, I almost never fall back to those jobs I thought, growing up, that I might want. I never think Boy, I wish I was an astronaut, or Man, if only I could be President, or Cowboying, here I come.

Actually I don't think I ever wanted to be a cowboy. But I did want to be an astronaut and President. Maybe at the same time.  I bet if I had been an astronaut and President, after all that they'd let me be an honorary shark scientist if I wanted.

It's telling, but I'm not sure what it's telling, exactly. I'm pretty sure that it says something that my go-to-getaway job is almost never what I thought I wanted to be when I was a kid. (The exception: When I was a kid, I thought for a while that I would grow up to be an oceanographer-- yes, I was that fun of a kid -- and "shark scientist" is more or less in that field.)

Instead, I pick jobs that seem to me, like I said, to feature only good things or lack bad things. Bartender, for example-- that seems like a "no pressure" job to me, one that never features me having to go back to the office after a day of trial, to spend my night returning phone calls and researching some esoteric point of law that came up during the day. "Bartender" and "Janitor" are jobs that end when the bar closes or the building is clean; no bartender, I imagine, ever has to stay late to look up new drinks. There are definite beginnings and endings to those jobs, unlike most of my daily tasks that involve rewrites and responses and appeals and reconsiderations.

The appeal of "Ice Cream Shop owner" is similar -- the job begins and ends at a set time and doesn't feature unexpected curve balls thrown at me during the day. Plus, "Ice Cream Shop Owners" would deal with people who are happy to pay. Lawyers' clients are never happy to pay; win and they think you've overcharged them anyway or they could have done it themselves. Lose, and they blame you for it and don't feel they should have to pay for you screwing up.

Nobody ever wants to pay for the privilege of leaving their ex-wife; it's an expensive kind of sadness. But nobody ever complains about paying for an ice cream cone; they're buying a couple of scoops of happy from you.

From that, you can see what it is I don't like about my current "job." I spend a lot of time mucking around in people's miseries, miseries that begin but never seem to end - -and then have to try to get them to pay me for making them (hopefully) a little less miserable.

That was then, this is now.  My practice has evolved a lot in the last six years, and I now spend my day doing things that I find incredibly meaningful.  I've helped people save their houses, get their kids back, recover money, and otherwise work through their problems.  Most of my clients end up far from miserable.  I must have been terribly down that day to write what I did, because I don't think I felt that way all the time back in 2008. 

The other end of the spectrum -- sitcom writers, sports talk radio guys -- hold different kinds of appeal. I imagine they're more freeform; as a sitcom writer, I could sit in a room with a computer and TV and iPod and toss a tennis ball in the air,

I don't know what that in particular appeals to me but I now have  in my office a small, spiky yellow ball that lights up when you throw it and I frequently toss it in the air and catch it as I talk on the phone or have conferences with my staff.  Chase your dreams!

listen to music, wear my cool t-shirts and shorts and sandals to work,

I wear a tie every day to work and I like it. Almost every day. Today I have a polo shirt and slacks and I feel underdressed. 

 type up some scripts full of funny jokes, and be done by noon. As a sports-talk-radio guy, all I'd have to do is have opinions on sports, plus I'd probably get to go to the Superbowl. I like to write. I like wearing t-shirts. I like talking about sports.

I have completely drifted away from sports.  I am right now only vaguely aware of what's going on in any sporting league.  Somewhere along the line it just stopped appealing to me very much.  I still kind of know the big stories, but if I watch even 1 NFL game this year, I would be surprised.  And while I'd go to the Super Bowl if you sent me and paid for it, it wouldn't be even in my top 20 choices of things to do. 

 Most of my daily life involves zero amounts of that, so when I'm driving into work wearing a tie and knowing that I'll have to spend the day dealing with an unpleasant lawyer (and all lawyers except me are unpleasant)

Still true.

and listening to a sports talk guy go on and on about how great Superbowl week is,

I never listen to talk radio anymore, espeically not inane sports talk radio.  This week, my commute to and from work saw me listening to Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son short story collection on audio book. 

I like to imagine chucking my briefcase (which actually looks like it's made out of a football and has an NFL logo on it)

I still have that briefcase but I don't use it anymore.  Instead, I use old backpacks that Mr F and Mr Bunches don't use for school.  So I have backpacks that have Sponge Bob, the Avengers, Star Wars, and Angry Birds.  People love them, and so do I.  

out the window and putting on my Buffalo Bills' Bruce Smith jersey

I do still have that, but my new go-to shirt is my Superman shirt with actual cape.


 and spending the day getting paid to talk about football.

pleh.

So I suppose that given all of that, The Best Job To Dream Of Having When You Get A Little Tired Of Having Your Own Job would be a subjective thing; it would, it would be reasonable to assume, depend on your own tastes and whims and whatever it is that's getting you down about your life at that given moment.

But it's not. It's an objective thing, because there is one job that, above all others, everyone in the world would want to have whenever they get a little tired of their own job. There is one occupation that, while very few people hold it now, everyone of us, when our own job gets tedious or annoying or hectic or just not good, everyone of us would or should be dreaming of having.

That job is: World Record Confirmer.

There could not be anything bad about that job. I've thought about this a lot today -- this being one of those days when I'm tired of my "job" and want to do something else -- and being the person who confirms for Guiness that a world record was or was not set could not possibly have any negatives.

Time pressures? Wrong-- none. People say they want to set a world record and you go confirm it. Neverending days at the office? Again, wrong; while you might sit for 72 hours watching someone balance an egg on their nose, when they drop that egg or hit 72 hours, it's over. Annoying competitors or counterparts? There's only one Guiness Book of World Records, so it's not like you'll have to deal with opponents contesting things with you.

As the World Record Confirmer, I would spend most of my time traveling the world and watching people achieve something they felt was amazing and fun, and confirming for them that they've achieved a personal best; what could be better than that? And if they fail, well, it's not like I'm telling them they have cancer or they're losing their house-- I just have to tell them, You just keep building that statue of Christopher Walken made out of discarded gumball machine toy-containing bubbles, and I'll be back in a few months to see if you've qualified, so even that aspect contains not sadness, but hope and the promise of better, greater things to come.

So days like today, when I'm sitting at my desk looking at the mountain of paper I've got to read before 5 p.m. -- or more likely 6 p.m. -- and I've taken a bunch of phone calls already and have more piled up, and the emails are crowding my inbox and outside it's 77 degrees and sunny but I'm wearing dress shoes and a tie, and glancing more and more at the pictures on my wall that I took on vacations that seem a long time ago, and replaying over and over "Wishing Well," on days like that, I like to kick back and imagine life as a shorts-wearing, t-shirt donning, world-traveling World Record Confirmer, shaking a kid's hand and telling him Awesome, Johnny, that is far and away the World's Fuzziest Guinea Pig, you're in the Book.

Then we all go buy a couple of scoops of happiness at my ice cream shop.

This post was written back when the celebrities were adopting all the babies in the world. Remember that fad? If you bought this t-shirt, you do.  

Celebrity Adoption:

Choose Me
by

brianefp
Get this custom shirt
at Zazzle

So I must have been having a really bad day back then.  Six years later, I'm sitting in my office, surrounded by pictures of past vacations and a suit of armor and a pirate ship and a giant stuffed snake, and it's 77 degrees out again, but my attitude is entirely different; I'm about to go sue some debt collectors and then later on this afternoon I'll argue about property with someone and I got to lecture a lawyer today on what it means to be a parent (on behalf of my client, not me) and I can't imagine doing any other job than this, right now.
I mean, unless there's an opening for 'shark scientist.'  

I know I did this once before but I like the effect and it's been a while. (Picture Of The Day)