At work, I, too often, would be talking away to someone only to discover they were on the phone so, yep, it’s something that could have happened and probably did to someone or maybe many someones. Nonetheless, it’s still a hoot.

For you it was the other motive I wondered about, just wanting to be in the story. And I see that impulse as coming from the meme too, like it’s the weaker form of the meme trying to really lodge itself inside your head. You read that story, and a part of you just kinda wishes it had happened to you.

Neat. It’s like there was a joke inside the joke, with a timed release to double the fun.

Funny Robert because when I had the chance I was gonna confess…really I was…

BUT trust me…it will happen…oh yes…

But not quite in the way I expected…

I laughed my ass off, and I could see that this one has star qualities; the sort of story that goes viral on the Net.

Giving in to the viral impulse, I mailed out copies to three people, saying it had just been posted on the Zone. Two wrote right back. One said it had happened to him; the other said that it was so funny because it could have happened to him.

Come to think of it, when I first read it, I racked my brains wondering if it had ever happened to me.

When I checked on the story’s virality by googling the punch line ‘”an idiot in the other stall who keeps answering all my question”‘, I was kinda startled to get 56,000 hits. But not, it turned out when I sampled a few, because the Zone had been the source of a viral story. Nope, some of those hits go back years. Jody’s post is a late-stage manifestation of a story that’s already been viral for a long time.

Here’s the spooky thing, and the only reason I’m posting this: All the references I sampled presented the story in the first person, as if it had actually happened to the poster. A self-deprecatory subject line and the first person writing are standard features of each telling.

Most of the posters were women (in my sample), and they told the story copy-and-paste verbatim.

When men told the story, they embellished it with commentary describing their own reactions of shock and confusion. Men need to spell out what women understand intuitively when we tell a story.

I think we have here an example of a meme in the wild exhibiting an unusual power to not just implant itself (in the usual form of a conscious idea), but to implant a false memory of its own experience; or its close cousin, a desire to fool other people into thinking it happened to the teller. It doesn’t work with everybody, but I recall after first reading it that I kind of hoped to turn up the memory of it happening to me. I felt the siren call of wanting to be able to put myself into the story, to “tell a story on myself” making an innocent mistake.

Who doesn’t want to be the star of a funny story, as long as there’s no sting?

So, Jody, enquiring minds want to know: Do you recall this happening to you?