LIES!!!

I’ve stopped receiving chain emails ever since I went on a crusade of responding to every little spurious piece of shite with a copypasta from the relevant snopes page.  Unfortunately, it means my inbox is now bereft of Lolcats and fail pics, except for the odd demotivational poster from a guy who sits next to me.

So today when a lady at work was telling a story about a Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? contestant that I knew already was a hoax, I kept my stupid mouth shut – I need those lolcats, damn it.   I’m glad I did, because it turned out more interesting than I expected.

The story she was telling was about the woman on WWTBAM? that apparently couldn’t correctly answer this $100 question:

Which of the following is the largest? 

1.  a peanut
2. an elephant
3. the moon
4. a tennis ball

The contestant allegedly used up all her lifelines and still picked ‘b’ as the answer (because the moon is really small in the sky, ok?)

So this woman at work had the screenshot of it up on her screen, probably as part of some lulzy email that I’d been excluded from.  She was pointing to it and telling everyone how her kids and she watched it on TV, how excrutiating it was, and what reasoning the woman had for picking the wrong answer.

In case you didn’t catch it, this story is a hoax, and therefore there’s no way she could have watched it on TV.  It’s a shopped screenshot of a UK contestant, and the hoax claims it was a US woman (from Texas, of course), so ignoring the obvious incompatibility with reality, why would it be on Australia’s WWTBAM?? 

Now, this woman is quite nice.  I like her.  She’s fairly wholesome, in the regular way, not in the Hillsong fundraising to go on a missionary trip to Afghanistan crazy way.  She smiles a lot, and is well liked at work.  I’m sure she lies – everyone does.  But only a certain kind of person makes up a story like this, a lie as unnecessary as it is elaborate, that does not advance her in any way.  She seemed totally genuine about it, too.  If I hadn’t already known better, I would have totally bought her story.

So why would she lie?  Is there a video version of this hoax too? Or maybe she’s accidentally created a false memory of this show.   Why the fuck do I even care?   My god, I should have better things to do than this.  Someone motivate me, please.