The Truth and Nothing But the Truth.

[cdybedahl]

In more or less random order:

Two beautiful women once approached me and my wife and suggested that the four of us have sex, and only sex, none of this tiresome relationship stuff.

True. Which almost all of you believed. I can only assume that things like that are regular occurrences in your lives, you lucky persons of undetermined origin.

Once when I flew from Manchester to Stockholm, the plane left Ringway Airport from a gate that does not actually exist.

Also true. It was while they were building the third terminal (the one that started out with the name Terminal 1 British Airways and now has the name Terminal 3, for reasons that should've been bloody obvious from the start), and a few of the usual gates were unusable due to construction equipment being in the way. So for a few flights they bussed the passengers out to a plane waiting near a hangar. On the monitors, they called this "Gate 49" (I think, I forget the exact number), which caused no end of confusion for us poor passengers since all the signs and stuff only mentioned Gates 1 to 48.

I once talked my french teacher into giving me a passing grade in spite of having attended only a handful of lessons all year and not having done any of the tests or homework.

True. She was fresh out of teacher's college and I somehow managed to make her think that it was all her fault. To this day I have no idea how I did that.

I once called the Soviet Embassy from a secret military installation and offered to sell them secrets.

More than half of you didn't believe this one, but it's absolutely true. I did my military service as a radar/communications operator in the branch of the Coast Artillery that guarded the Stockholm Archipelago from foreign submarine activity. This consisted of spending every other week on an arsehole of an island, where three groups of us took turns sitting in a bunker looking at surveillance equipment (all of which was classified, and the entire island counted as secret and off-limits to civilians) for five to seven hours. After a few months of that, you get extremely bored. Unbelievably bored. More bored than I thought it was possible to be. So when one dark night (as if we could the difference between day and night...) one of the guys suddenly says "I wonder what would happen if one of us called the Soviet Embassy and offered to sell secrets" and you're sitting in front of a shitload of expensive comms equipment, well... For your information, they just hung up on me. I guess they got quite a few crank calls like mine, although probably not very often from that kind of installation.

Much later I happened to meet one of the guys who replaced us when our year on the arsehole island was over, and he told me that before they were allowed to go to the island they all had to go through a major background check by the Swedish Security Police (SÄPO). I like to think that that was largely my fault. While calling the Soviet Embassy was probably the most grossly wrong thing I did, it was far from the only one. I so wish I'd read Catch-22 back then, because to a disturbingly large degree I was ex-PFC Wintergreen from that book, right down to playing stupid tricks with internal communications and abusing regulations to avoid work.

At a fan convention once, I got stuck in an elevator with Jacqueline Pearce.

This one's bollocks, as three of you guessed. I included it because a couple of fans did get stuck in an elevator together with David Jackson during the Deliverance convention back in 1998, and I hoped that mutated memory of that incident would make the B7 fans more inclined to believe this. Apparently it worked on katlinel :-)

Comments

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

Ah well, suggestible, that's me.

Wasn't it Gareth Thomas who did get stuck in the lift? I did share a lift with David Jackson, who kindly held doors open for me, while I limped around, recovering from a broken foot bone.

True. Which almost all of you believed. I can only assume that things like that are regular occurrences in your lives, you lucky persons of undetermined origin.

It's never happened to me, but I'm quite prepared to believe that it happened to you, and many other people.