okay this is very tangential to that other post about the churchgoer who expressed outrage at someone wearing a backwards baseball cap at a Christmas Eve service and said “you can’t make this up”

But I find it kind of sadly fascinating that so many of the things people claim “can’t be made up” are like. the most mundane things, that would not even take more than the absolute minimum creativity to “make up”

if you were a writer trying to make up a scene where a character dressed in a way that the congregation might view as disrespectful for church, “wearing a backwards baseball cap” is like… probably the very first or second thing that a decent writer would reject as Too Cliched

“can’t make it up” WTF. (Why? because every 10-year-old writing their first fanfic already did?)

…at one of my jobs, probably the worst one I ever had, I came in one day to see everyone, from the site manager to the entry-level employees, talking absolute vitriolic trash about some applicant who’d failed to show up for her interview on the scheduled day and then later called saying she’d be in for the interview on a different day. “Who does she think she is? The nerve! Like we’re gonna give her a chance after she just straight up ghosted us” etc etc

And not once did anyone even mention what seemed to me like the obvious explanation (that there had been a misunderstanding about what day the interview was scheduled). And I knew that if I mentioned it, I’d just get disdain, because the culture of that workplace was “always assume deliberate malice, from everyone always” and if I broke that code I was clearly just the clueless newbie talking about things I didn’t understand (and if I turned out to be right, then I’d get disdain with resentment-coated embarrassment on top, and none of that would be pleasant for anyone)

so I kept my mouth shut, and what do you know, it did turn out to be a scheduling miscommunication. Big surprise. And then I sat there with my mouth still shut, in a room full of coworkers expressing total astonishment and going “you can’t make this stuff up!!!” over and over

… inwardly going, yes you can, jfc, it doesn’t even take creativity, it is the first thought that pops into any reasonable person’s head, what is wrong with this place

Anyway, I have a difficult time trusting people who say that something can’t be made up.

Or at least I have a high threshold. It’s gotta be a thing that I actually have some difficulty imagining how a person would make up.

And I’ve… very rarely seen the phrase used for anything like that.