The doctor diagnosed pathological liar, I used to know, who regularly lied to me, often would tell a lie when the truth would just be simpler. Often there was no point to the lie.
I'll give you one good example of this particular person's pathological lying.
One day she called me and told me that the day before she'd flown from Seattle to Phoenix for lunch, for free. That a friend of hers, who is an Alaska Airlines flight attendant, was able to fly her to Phoenix for free for lunch.
With this particular pathological liar when you ask followup questions she quickly gets defensive, because she suspects, accurately, that she's been caught lying again. I remember asking how she got to Sea-Tac. She said she drove herself there. I asked how much the parking cost. She didn't remember. I asked how they got to the restaurant when they got to Phoenix. Rather than say they got a taxi, she made up a lie about cars being available to flight attendants. I asked where the flight attendant got the key. She didn't remember. I asked what the name of the restaurant was. She did not remember.
A short while after I was told the lie about flying to Phoenix for lunch, I was at an event in Seattle with this particular pathological liar. The Alaska Airlines flight attendant showed up. The pathological liar and the flight attendant started talking about a Golden Corral in Spokane that they thought was fabulous.
I know what you are thinking if you've been to a Golden Corral, that being that these people I know are tasteless morons. Well, let's not be judgmental until we experience that fabled Spokane Golden Corral.
So, the flight attendant tells the pathological liar that he can get them roundtrip tickets to Spokane for 50 bucks, that they should fly to Spokane for lunch at the Golden Corral. The pathological liar was all excited about this plan. I sat there thinking should I or should I not ask why it cost $50 to fly to Spokane for lunch when it was free to fly to Phoenix for lunch?
But, with this particular pathological liar I had long known that one risked a temper tantrum if one blatantly exposed one of her lies. And so I did not say anything. I sort of regret this.
Changing the subject from pathological liars to cheaters.
By cheaters I'm talking about the meaning of the word that is associated with cheating to win a simple game. People who cheat to win a game are sort of like pathological liars, in that they don't realize how transparently obvious the cheating, or the lie, is.
For instance, if a person in normal conversation seems to have a limited vocabulary, with infrequent use of polysyllabic words and frequent use of cliche, and yet somehow, when playing a game like Scrabble online, time and again gets a lot of points with obscure words, the meaning of which I do not know, it is sort of a dead giveaway that the person is cheating.
Now, if you play Scrabble online with 5 or 6 different people it really makes the cheater standout, due to the preponderance of obscure words.
So, I was curious what was available online for Scrabble cheaters. I was not too surprised to find that there is a lot of help for Scrabble cheaters. Like this website called "Scrabble Word Finder."
There are websites where you enter the words that are on your current Scrabble board, then you type in the letters that you have available to play. You are then shown obscure words and where to place them to get a lot of points.
A real dead giveaway of the Scrabble cheater is if over and over again they use up all their tiles making up a word. This gets a lot of points.
What I don't understand is why would this be any fun to play this way? What possible ego gratification does one get from cheating to win a simple game like Scrabble? This just seems really sad to me.
