Stabbed to death in a knife fight in Seattle. Never happened, but so many have told me.

I have no idea where it comes from…It’s been decades.

That I’m a handsome sex machine, with charisma to spare.

No idea who started that one. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I was a manager, and another guy was a more senior manager in another division. We both did IT. For some reason he didn’t like me and/or was trying to get our services moved to him, so he went to our director every week for over a year to tell him made-up stories about me.

He eventually left after a lot of people realized he was a highly manipulative, but I still hear things that he told people as part of an explanation about why I was passed up “for this” or why I wasn’t right “for that.” It cost me a lot of raises, especially in cases where things were gossiped to other people and the source was lost. Now I’m only a manager in title, but my management responsibilities were taken away.

Unfortunately, I’m caught in a ticking trap – another 1.5 years and I retire with a full pension for the rest of my life. Losing that by leaving isn’t worth it (assuming I live long enough afterwards).

I guess it depends, different people would consider different ones more damning than others. Many of these come from aspects about me. Where I currently live, the worst thing you can be accused of, and which plagues everyone close to me, is endangerment, the bad kind. Earlier in my childhood though when I was in another setting, people were more spiritually in-tune and believed me being a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter with a medical condition and heathenic traits meant I was bewitched.