When we were assigned to blog about what our pet peeves are it did not take me long to decide what to write about. My biggest pet peeve by far is people that are compulsive liers and people I loke to call a "one-upper". I had a friend in high school that was the perfect example of both of these and needless to say we weren't that close of friends. This friend was one of those people that always wanted to be the center of attention and would do anything to get it. Most of what he did to get attention was either making up some crazy story that was obviously not true or after someone else would tell a story about something they thought was cool or funny, he would tell a similar story that was just a little better than theirs. It always would irritate me when I would tell all my friends about something crazy that happened to me over the weekend or something like that, and he would take the opportunity to then tell another story (likely a made up story) that was just a little bit better than mine. There is even a Facebook group dedicated to this friend called "so this one time me and my brother..." because that is how he begins 90 percent of his stories and then concludes with "but dont ask my brother he was drunk (or "knocked out" depending on his mood/story). I think most (if not all) of us find people like this extremely irritating and sometimes hard to deal with. I dont see any really good solution to this pet peeve of mine other than possibly confronting this person about it but that could do more harm than good. I think that people like this are the ones responsible for changing this behavior, however, changing my mindset to that which this pet peeve doesn't bother me as much could help as well.
-Dallan Turnbull
The best way to combat a one-upper is to learn to make up really sweet, fake stories on command! Nothing feels better than one-upping a one-upper. However, since your other pet peeve was compulsive lying... you might want to take a different track. Calling someone out on their one-upping is also effective. Like so: Person 1-"My dad ran a marathon!" Person 2-"Blah blah blah my dad is Batman and my patriarchal blessing says my future spouse is going to be smokin' hot..."
ReplyDeleteFollow up this one-uppance with, "Well, it's a good thing we had someone here to one-up my story! If you didn't everyone would have just had to hear MY story! And that would have been truly tragic."
Sometimes I feel like they took out the hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" out of the hymn book just so the Tabernacle Choir could "one-up" everybody...
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