Did you know the word "Gullible" isn't in the dictionary!?

There is a tumblr website dedicated to people who think articles from The Onion are real. It is all screen caps from people's facebook pages, who post the stories because they are outraged.

Focus: Make fun of these idiots for believing the absurd stories in there.

Alt-Focus: Tell us the last time you fell for a prank or lie? Did you feel stupid later? How much were you made fun of?

 

My favorite one is to tell people after I've fixed their computer to try to make sure that the power cord runs downhill from the wall socket to the back of the machine, because the electrons have an easier time flowing downhill. About 80% of people believe me if I say it with a straight face.

I will admit to having been caught out by stories in Snopes' repository of lost legends.

 

This site has so much awesome in it, though I must admit I once myself was caught by a false news report. After 10pm you can't buy alcohol anymore in Estonia (yes, it's incredibly fucking stupid) and the news report said something about the time limit being reversed (ie. you can only buy alcohol after 10pm). I started to tell someone about this and the second I blurted it out, I realized what a fucking moron I was.

 

My friend is actually one of the people on this site being outraged at the abortitorium. It doesn't show the 56 comments they got of people calling them an idiot and the legitimate fight that comes from it.

 

I once convinced a friend that the Great Wall of China was only 6 feet tall.

I told here that they are all short over there, so they concentrated on length. She repeated this as fact.

Granted, this is a girl who thought she was in a Masters program, and went into massive debt to pay for it, but all it was for was a program certificate at the end. I caught on when she told me that she was graduating with a masters after only 8 months of part time schooling.

 

The people who believe the stories that are the result of living in a partisan echo chamber I can kinda sorta understand (see the Obama/Abortionplex ones), but this I have no words for.



America's two most important cities bite the dust from something out of Team America 2: Electric Boogaloo, and you find out from some website called The Onion!?

 

I am really only gullible when it comes to one person: Harry Coolahan. (Or, maybe, he's the only one that tries to trick me.) He thinks it's HILARIOUS. I do not. However, this one story was kind of funny at the time, and funnier in hindsight:

Last year, we started talking hypothetically about how gross it is when blowjobs end in puke, and then he said something along the lines of "Oh, you don't remember?" and spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to convince me that at some point I had, in fact, thrown up on him while giving him head. At first I was pretty sure he was just fucking with me, but then he was keeping with it for so long and I was wondering if maybe with some combination of being what I assumed was blackout drunk and passed time if it could be possible that I really did and had just blocked it from my memory. I don't think I ever fully believed it, but I was seriously questioning it and getting really upset. I even started kind of remembering it.=, wondering if it had been one of the times we had wound up in the shower after drunk sex and I just didn't remember why we were in the shower. It was the worst.

I wavered between being fully suspicious and nearly succumbing to it, until he stopped having any real answers to my questions and then tried to tell me it had happened "two or three times." Booo.

 

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.onionsportsnetwork.com/articles/yankees-ensure-2003-pennant-by-signing-every-playe,32/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.onionsportsnetwork.com/artic ... -playe,32/</a>

It's funny because the Yankees eventually did that.

 

Gillette says "Fuck it, We're Doing Five Blades"

Oh, wait...

 

One way to screw around with the gullible is the fact that on facebook you can change the description summary to any link
So link a CNN article, then change the summary to something more offensive, matching with the picture. Many wont click and will just rage based on the fake summary

 

I have a general policy: stupid questions deserve stupid answers. There are some people I went to school with who, despite the fact I wasn't close with them at all, would ask prying questions about my relationship. It is particularly satisfying when this person asks you, in front of your friends, "Hey, are you and your girlfriend still broken up?" and all your friends point out "uh, they were never broken up in the first place." Or the long, long threads I've woven about how we take "breaks" during the long-distance periods and have an open relationship.

 

I once convinced quite a few people in Victoria that American McDonald's had all the ketchup replaced with mayonnaise in an effort to make the nation fatter. The downside was I had to eat my fries with mayonnaise all the time to keep the lie going.

That whole thing that went around a while back about the boob worms burrowing into your boobs or whatever it was, that shit terrified me. I cried for days thinking that my boobs were going to turn full of holes, and I fucking HATE. HOLES. And subcutaneous parasites. Ugh. I shudder just to remember that image. Even knowing it is fake, I still freak out when I see that picture, because what if? What if...

 

My old colleague stitched me up reasonably well. She convinced my boss to put a photo of a very black African woman and two kids in his office, and claim they were his wife and children. I knew he had grown up in Kenya, so it all seemed perfectly logical. Imagine my surprise when I met his extremely whitebread wife for the first time.

Same boss told me that I had to present to a group of 50 potential investors, asking for $800k, on 15 minutes notice. I was nervous, but determined to make a good showing for it. This would actually have been in character for him, as he was forever bailing on us at the last minute and we would have to go in to his meetings cold. I was actually disappointed when he turned out to be kidding this time - instead, he made the other gent that worked with us present to them on 10 minutes notice.

It was awesome having a trained thespian for a boss - he put a lot of stock in improv.

 

I fell for this site awhile back.

http://www.ding.net/bonsaikitten/

 

Was working in the Abatoirs around 2001 for a few months before I joined Defence and at one point on the line there is a sort of steam vacuum used to remove loose bits of wool from the sheeps carcass. I was working next to it one day and it started playing up not putting out any steam, I managed to convince the poor sap who was using it that the steam ahd run out and he should go see the supervisor and bring back a few buckets of steam for it.

 

I used to work for the Onion in the Chicago office, and we got a ton of angry hate mail directly when people didn't get we were satire. Our HR Manager would put them up on a bulletin board in the kitchen next to office policy stuff because she knew that's the only way we'd read it. I can say one thing, if you think these are funny, I wish I could get some copies of people's "resumes" they sent in for the Onion. People would shit themselves laughing, the effort that went into them were insane. Stories, fullblown printed poster boards, complete mock newspapers, comic books made with paper and pencil on printer paper.

Not sure if it has been beaten, but the reigning champion of the angry hate mail letters was a Thai chick complaining about an article that was "anti-semetic" written by "Adam Goldstein". It was pretty fucking good, she ranted about how offended she was even though her name was like Tina Ngyuen or something. Also, there was an article about some female shampoo (Panteen Pro-V) being used to masturbate boyfriends and husbands in the shower apparently Panteen corporate got a few inquiries if it was a legitimate use of the shampoo.

 

Ha, we do this all the time with the new kids or the fucking assholes. Both are funny as hell.

Id tell one of the new apprentices to go get the wire stretcher from the truck, or if we are at the shop, tell one of them to ask the owner for the keys to the basement to get a broom. The best is when they spend an hour looking for something like a "wire stretcher" because they don't want to look useless. Most of the other guys are on board so when they ask around for the fake tool they point them in the wrong direction.

One time I told a kid his EMT pipe run had to be running at an exact 5 degree slope so the electrons could flow better. I came back an hour later and he was still lowering the pipe on one end.

When people are looking at lighting drawings to find out the number of lights to bring into a room to install, Ive told them that the blacked out lights on the drawing (which indicates an emergancy power fed light) means the fixture is black and that they had to find them and bring those up. On a big job they could be sorting through lights for several hours.