It's April 1 today, the one day in the year that ordinary people are encouraged to make up some tall story to fool people. Journalists and politicians do this all the time, so their work will go on as normal, but us ordinary folks who don't constantly lie, may find it difficult to construct a good story. However, it's simple and straight forward, provided we stick to some basic rules.
First of all, the story must start out very innocent. There mustn't be any hint of mischief right from the start. Then, as the listener is drawn into the story, we gradually add layers of absurdities until the listener either figures out the lie on their own, or we manage to get to the end of it, in which case we inform them that they've been fooled.
As an example we can imagine a phone call with an old friend that we haven't talked to in a while. We start off with a bit of small talk as usual. Then we plant the seed of our story. The plague gets mentioned, and we tell our friend that we caught the bug.
Our friend will no doubt ask us to elaborate, and that's when we know that our friend is hooked. We tell our friend that it was pretty bad. We coughed so hard that we thought we would die. We went to the hospital, and we were put into a ventilator. But we cannot say much about the experience, because they put us into a medically induced coma, and everything blanked out. It wasn't before three days later that we were woken up again. It was quite an experience, but we're fine now.
When asked about when all this happened, we'll choose a Friday as the day we went into the ventilator and a Sunday as the day we came out of it. The very best dates would be Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but that may be difficult to say with a straight face.
 |
| Ventilator |
By National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NIH) - National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NIH), Public Domain, Link
No comments:
Post a Comment