Anyone who has known me for more than a few minutes probably knows that I have a huge stick up my ass about lying. That doesn't mean I'm some shining paragon of purity who has never lied in her life, but for the most part, I will generally avoid lying.
That being said, so many people have mentioned to me that I really need to get over myself. Lying is a natural part of life, and if I want to get anywhere, I need to learn to lie - everyone else does it, so it's really just leveling the playing field. So I said that at a friend's housewarming, I would practice, and pretend to be someone completely different to get better at lying. Seeing as most of the people there wouldn't know anything about me, it would be a good opportunity. But now that I've thought about it a bit more, it seems like a really stupid thing to do. What if I meet someone that I really like, and would like to become friends with? I'd either have to continue to be that fake person, or tell them the truth, and then their first impression of me would be that I'm a liar.
This has happened before. In first year, I joined a club and met some new people. A few of them played WoW, two were Alliance on Blackrock, and the other was Horde. The two Alliance players had never seen the Horde player in game, because this was back when there was no armory, and guilds were massive, so you could easily get away with claiming to be in a guild that you weren't. Also before realID, so they couldn't check if he was online. Anyway, so when I mentioned that I was Horde on Blackrock, the Alliance guys asked me to go and find their Horde friend. I thought nothing of it, and I agreed. So I asked to add the Horde guy to my friends list, and that's when he told me he wasn't Horde on Blackrock - he didn't even play the game! He told me not to tell the other guys, and I did it, but I always thought it was strange.
What did he gain from lying about playing a game that he didn't actually play? I guess maybe he would fit in a bit better with everyone else, but I got the impression that they already respected him a lot, so I didn't think that was the reason. Besides, he told them he was on the other faction, so it's not like they could play together. It was difficult enough hanging out with MrMan4 and we wanted to spend time together in game despite being opposite factions. Talking is limited to emotes (although I think back when 2-Alliance-1-Horde Hunt was going on, you could use /me [message] to actually talk to people, not sure if it was patched out before or after the series of events, but it was definitely in Vanilla WoW, so MrMan4 and I had no chance of talking in game).
Eventually, I asked Horde Guy why he did it, and he did it as a joke. I still find that explanation unsatisfactory, but maybe I just didn't get the punchline. It seems like a lot of effort to go through for so little gain. He'd have to research what all the fights are like, and the mechanics of his class in order to be able to hold a decent conversation about the game. How do you convince someone that your guild has cleared Molten Core if you've never even seen the place, much less participated in the fights?
Once I found out about the lie, I had a very hard time trusting him. We'd known each other for maybe a couple of weeks, and the first thing about him was this huge lie. This huge, confusing lie. We've known each other for years now, the stage where you'd expect to the trust level to be around 90%+, but I find that every now and again I have to stop myself and rethink whether he's lying to me.
When I meet new people, my default position is to trust them. Sure, if they're trying to tell me that they have a fool-proof plan to make millions, all they need is my credit card number and expiry, alarm bells will start ringing, but I think they are innocent until proven guilty. I'd like to think that people who meet me have the same expectation of me - that I'm trustworthy until proven otherwise. So I just want to repay that trust in me by not lying to people. I hate the thought that I could be someone else's Horde Guy, and that they feel like they can't always believe the things that I'm saying.
That's why I think learning to lie well is a dark path, it leads to people questioning your claims and your motives. But someone at work who I despise and think is incompetent got promoted recently. He has no problems with playing dirty. When I called him out on the fact that some of the stuff he said he did, he didn't actually do, he just shrugged it off and said that's how the game is played. During my performance review, one of the pieces of feedback someone said was, "It's was a pleasure to work with Anna... she has no hidden agenda. It is refreshing to have someone who says what they think." I actually thought it was a compliment, and I have a lot of respect for the guy who said it, but maybe he was subtly telling me to change. I mean, the fact that he finds it refreshing means that it's not the norm.
"...[he] was a brave man, honest and loyal … but quite a hopeless player.” He brought the seed to his mouth with the knife. “In King’s Landing, there are two sorts of people. The players and the pieces.”
Martin, George R. R. (2012-03-15). A Game of Thrones: The Story Continues: The complete 5 books (A Song of Ice and Fire) (Kindle Locations 44250-44252). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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