Do you have a colleague who always tells you about the crazy-fun weekend he had, when all you can do is think about how you were home alone in a snuggie watching Netflix?
You know, the guy who talks about how he took a last-minute flight to Miami and then unexpectedly ended up on a yacht with Fortune 500 CEOs? Come on, you know, the guy who said that he was offered a Hollywood movie premier ticket after some playful banter with a celebrity at The Ivy?
Meet Manuel of Plano, TX, or as he refers to himself, "Da Man." All of his colleagues adore him and never get tired of the very detailed and fun stories he tells at the weekly happy hour he organizes. Without exception, each of his colleagues describes him as simply "larger than life."
His friends portray him in a different fashion, however. They claim that that he has created a fake persona at work to make him appear more interesting to his colleagues. In interviews with Manuel's friends, we learned that Manuel may actually lead a very lonely, boring, and somewhat disturbing life. "Manuel goes to the local playground alone and just sits there pounding 40s and making faces at the kids," said close friend Mike. Another close friend, Rick, said "he's well-meaning, but can't seem to do anything without it being weird and off-putting. Here's an example: he wants to help people and meet girls, so he volunteers at the local hospital. It sounds great at first, but then you find out that he's the guy who smacks the little butts of newborns in the NICU. I mean, who volunteers to do that?"
Intrigued, we confronted Manuel to get his side of the story. "Look, my friends know a lot about some of me, like how I enjoy sleeping on self-knitted baby arms every night so I can be 'held by the future' as it were, but they don't know all of me," said Manuel. "My friends will tell you about the Manuel who gives his coworkers rides to work in nice cars, but they won't tell you about Da Man who steals those cars and wins street races! My colleagues know those stories." Prior to hanging up on us, he said that his friends "need to wake up, smell the proverbial coffee, and understand that [he is] multidimensional and envied by most at the office."
Update: One man, two very different personalities? Sounds a bit trite. An avid reader who would like to remain anonymous said that Manuel's yacht story sounds a lot like a heavily embellished event in his own past. In his words: "A yacht? Absolutely not. A large group of tourists were on a glass-bottomed boat tour in Munising looking at old shipwreck sites and I remember someone saying that it was 'so cool to be on a yacht…let's find a hidden treasure and use it to become Fortune 500 CEOs!' That joke fell flatter than a flatlined EKG." The truth? We'll leave that up to you, but we hope the truth sets someone free.
Epsilon McSchnitzel contributed to this report.
