Woman uses a bad Photoshop of a punctured tire to call out of work, plus other painfully bad lies
By Robin ZlotnickOct. 11 2024, Updated 7:23 p.m. ET
Some will say that the lesson of this article is not to lie. But they'd be wrong. The lesson is lie well. Don't be obvious about your lies. Construct them carefully. Think about every stage of the lie at which you could be caught, and create workarounds. Lying is an art form. But the people featured here are as far from professional artists as it gets.
Someone recently posted to Twitter the picture their coworker sent to get out of work. This woman claimed she'd gotten a nail in her tire, it went flat, and she wouldn't make it to the office. But the picture the liar sent her boss was so badly photoshopped that you couldn't even believe her story for one second.
It's literally a cartoon nail. The Clip Art of nails. And it's supposedly entering the tire at a totally impossible angle. Not to mention the tire itself, which is also clearly not real. This is a bad lie. A very bad lie. And the fact that it's so bad only serves to insult her boss. Did she really think her boss was going to fall for this illustration?
The tweet went totally viral and prompted all sort of responses, mostly of disbelief. One person even googled "nail in tire" and realized this picture was one of the first ones to show up.
She chose the fakest looking picture of the bunch! The sheer lack of effort put into the lie is astounding. Faking a flat tire is one of the oldest excuses in the book of excuses for how to get out of work, and nowadays, with Uber and Lyft, you don't really have an excuse to miss an entire day for a flat tire anyway. So if you're going to use the excuse, you have to work hard to make it look real.
One dude knew if he was going to fake a flat tire, he had to make it look real. By putting in that extra bit of effort, the excuse worked like a charm.
That's how you photoshop a flat tire, people! Sure, the hubcap looks different, but the chance is slim that their boss knows what all their employees' hubcaps look like. The only thing he has to do now is make sure he's not seen gleefully driving his car anywhere near his job.
Like I said, lying is all about believability. You won't get away with a photoshopped cartoon nail in your tire. And you won't get away with any lie that's so over-the-top most people would have a hard time believing it.
The next people featured tried to sell lies that are so obviously bad that they were called out almost immediately.
If you're going to lie about getting a DM from Seth Rogen, don't tag Seth Rogen, a man who is fully in control of his faculties and knows for sure whom he did and did not DM. Everything about this exchange makes me cringe, but especially the apostrophe is "Tuesdays," which is slowly killing my grammar-loving heart.
You simply can't argue with security footage, so it's best not to lie about what happened in a place where cameras are recording everything that takes place. If the toddler's mom is any indication, her kid is probably going to grow up to be quite a piece of work.
If someone asked you about "Governor Steve Buscemi" and you didn't know who he was, wouldn't you take like two seconds and google him to see what the story was before jumping to answer? This is just common sense. On a side note, I would love to live in a town governed by Steve Buscemi. Just putting it out there.
First of all, it's really bad that he's wearing the sunglasses he claims have never been worn in his photo. Second of all, where did he do this sunglass photo shoot? In the trunk of his dirty car? Get it together, man!
This is next level. Incredible. Belongs in the internet hall of fame. Not only did he make up such a blatant lie, but he got called out on Reddit by his mom. I truly hope she printed this out, framed it, and hung it in every room of their house.
Lying isn't usually the best course of action, but if you're going to do it, for goodness' sake, do it better than these people. Or else you'll be taking that same cartoon nail and hammering it down into your own coffin.
Editor's Note: The article was originally published in January 2020. It has since been updated.