Rumours/Gossip/Urban Legends

[NightAngel]

The Gumball Myth:

Blockbuster used to have those commercials with the rabbit and guinea pig named Carl and Ray (voiced by Jim Belushi and James Woods). Our gumballs had pictures of Carl and Ray on them at that time.

The myth was that if you got a specific character on your gumball you'd get a free rental. Of course, it wasn't true at all and there were many people who argued the myth with me and didn't get anything free in the end.

The character in question changed frequently depending on which gumball people got.

[MadMike]

There apparently was a rumor that the supermarket where I worked was going out of business. I had several customers ask me if it was true, and when it was going to happen. And of course, I had no idea. It eventually did, but not until about a year and a half after I left.

We had this one cashier who had a reputation for messing around with the truck drivers who delivered to our store. No idea if there was any truth to this one.

At some point, I was supposedly banging one of the cashiers. You see, I didn't have a car, but it was only about a ten-minute walk to work. She eventually got a car, and the dorms were on her way home, so if we were both working, sometimes she'd be nice and give me a ride home. Because of this, that meant we had to have been messing around, despite the fact that she simply dropped me off, and never took me to her place or came up to mine. In fact, a few times, I found some obnoxious signs in my bay saying this like, "Hey Mike! Did **** give you a ride?" It's funny how much things have changed since then. Sexual harrassment wasn't the big issue it is today. No doubt that heads would have rolled if that happened today.

[Ree]

I know of one. Though this is more of a ghost story so maybe you'll have to move it.

Everyone hears lots of stories about hospitals being haunted and for good reason. If a place is going to be haunted, it would be a hospital.

Not to go , but our local hospital is supposedly haunted.
I never knew that until a couple of years ago when I read it in a book about "Ghost Stories of Ontario".

Funny thing, I am a skeptic on the ghost thing, but when I read that, a light bulb went off.
The area where the ghosts are rumored to be seen, used to be the area where the 'candy stripers' (teen volunteers) used to go to dress for work. I was a candy striper in high school. I remember on nights when I ended up working alone, I was so creeped out in that area, that I couldn't wait to get the heck out of there.

It was fine if there were two of us, but if I was alone, I was always filled with this panic as soon as I got to that hallway. I just chalked it up to my being a wuss.

The story of the haunting is an interesting one, though, if anyone is interested. http://www.torontoghosts.org/ottawa/perth1.htm

[Myra]

I sell for a cellular phone company that went through a merger last year. Well someone spread a nice rumor around last winter that on a certain date, ALL the Yellow Box Company phones were going to be shut off, and the customers would be FORCED to buy phones from the other company in the merger or pay their early termination fees. This is about the dumbest thing ANY company could ever do, and it was never in the plans. I don't know who started the rumor, but it drove me nuts for a few weeks before finally, corporate sent out a letter with everyone's bills stating that they were not going to shut off service on anyone's phones unless there was good reason. (I.E. unpaid bills, that sort of thing.)

Other than that, not really sure.

[friendofjimmyk]

Since we have the incredible shrinking department nowadays...rumors are rampant...but I do my best to steer clear of BS and part of that is not re-stating it to others. Even here, because 3 of my other co-workers are on here!

the worse one for gossiping is leaving, thank god.

[Zinjadu]

Two rumours that come up every couple of years are:

1. One of our three smaller grocery stores in the city is going to be closed. The store to be closed changes depending on who's telling the story.

2. The company owns land in the northwest end of the city and will soon be building a new store there. The newest twist on this one is that construction has finally started -- but the truth is the construction isn't for a new S******, it's for a car dealership!

There's also a rumour that a manager at one S****** in my city got murdered by thieves just before he went on vacation and they hid his body in the compressor room, so it wasn't found for a few weeks. ::cues spooky music:: This was supposed to have happened in the early '80s.

[repsac]

I then see a 4-5 foot long black snake zoom away from me! He was gonna kill me and eat me! AAAAH! NOOOO!

They're called blue racers, and they'll do that. Completely harmless really. Non poisonous and what not. The blue racer, is a male blacksnake. Black snakes kill and often eat poisonous snakes. More often than not, they'll just kill the poisonous one and leave it for you to find. Don't ask me why they do that, I know suzy (one we've had under an outbuilding for years) loves to do that to me. It's like she's a big six foot long cat. She'll kill something like a copper head, and leave it where she KNOWS I'm going to find it.


One legend I remember, (gross ghostie type story here) from an old company I worked at was:

The company had these two huge old boilers. HUGE things some twelve feet tall and twenty feet long. One of them was permanently cut off from the steam heating and walled up. When I asked, I was told that the reason was that this boiler had killed someone. Supposedly, the mill was haunted also.

The story went that a maintence man was working in the boiler room where that particular boiler was kept. He was working on one of the steam lines or something when another maintence man opened the wrong valve. In seconds, that boiler room was FILLED with live steam, scalding the maintence man to death. The burns were so bad, that they had to scoop (It had melted his skin off the bone) him out of there. Since that boiler was deemed unsafe, it was cut off and left. The ghost stories told that sometimes people would hear the pipes which came from that boiler rattle like it did when the big dump happened. Also people would sometimes hear someone walking around in that room even though the door was welded shut and there was no way in.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Repsac: that story is disturbing. I just about

Anyhoo, in my store's backroom there's a big red stain on one of the walls. It's obviously a paint stain. However, we like to tell the new hires that it's a bloodstain from when somebody got killed back there in a messy fashion, and the ghost of the slain worker still roams the backroom and plays with the lights.

[Bella_Vixen]

3 years ago, the gas station I was working at was an Amoco. Cross corner from us was a BP. BP bought out Amoco. My boss was given a great deal in order to tear down and rebuild as a BP. When word of this got around, customers would come in and ask if it was true. Confirmed. Then they would ask, "What will happen to the BP across the street?"

My answer:






(are you sure you want to know?)








"They're turning into an Amoco."

You would not believe how many people believed me.