true story, I swear

… true story, I swear …

One of my favorite sites, that I often end up spending my free hours at work reading, snopes.com | Urban Legends Reference Pages. What brought me back to it this morning was the telling of yet another urban legend, as a “true story”. This one a variation on older white woman scared by black men on elevator that turn out to be celebrities. I guess I just find it so fascinating that people don’t say “No way, that can’t be true!” I guess that’s part of it. We want to be able to laugh at other people, believe that celebrities are that outrageous (or racist, in Tommy Hilfiger’s case), so we ignore the sketchy details, the ‘friend of a friend’ or ‘my cousin’s girlfriend’s hairdresser’. Being online, I get hit with a lot of these, usually to tell me that a free service is moving towards a pay one, like I really care if Yahoo is going to start charging users? Or worse, the people in my office send them around. Now these are people who work with computers and should know better. Ah well.