Picture this: ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives, but behind closed doors, a whole different persona emerges. We’re talking about individuals who were living parallel lives, carefully crafting their façades to keep their secrets hidden from prying eyes. You won’t believe the lengths they went to maintain their double lives – the elaborate lies, the intricate cover-ups, and the heart-stopping close calls.
My grandfather.
He had 13 kids with my grandmother. At some point after 13, he left my grandmother and lived with another woman. We found out at some point that while having kids with my grandma, he was having kids with his other wife too… In fact, there were times that he has both his wife and second wife pregnant at the same time. When he named the kids, he named them:
My grandma: Greg Francis
Second wife: Francis Greg
Basically, he’d name kids the same thing so he wouldn’t mess up the names.
Our family cat.
Was outside one night and I see my cat walking directly towards my neighbor’s house and then I see their front door open. Walks directly inside like she’d done it a million times.
She was outside quite a bit so we assumed she was outside doing cat stuff. Nope, little kitty was just at home #2.
My grandmother passed away a couple of years ago. While going through her house, my family found a box with my grandfather’s name on it in his handwriting. My grandfather died before I was born. It was taped closed and the dust on it suggested it hadn’t ever been opened.
Inside, my family found newspaper clippings and other documents.
Turns out that in the early 1900s, my grandfather took a road trip with friends to see the ocean. During their time at the beach, their car was stolen. They decided to stay awhile; being in their late teens and out of school, they decided to earn some money and have a good time.
My grandfather met a Mexican girl and married her within the course of a month. There was an article on vehicle theft, as well as another on marriage and a marriage certificate.
We could never find information on what happened next. We don’t even rightly know if they married for love, to get her citizenship, if they had kids, or even if he was legally divorced when he married my grandmother in the 1930s. We don’t think my grandmother knew.
We did find out his first wife returned to Mexico. She did have children (who say they don’t think their mom had kids before she remarried). We sent them copies of the documents we found and they were as flabbergasted as we were.
In one of my previous jobs a few years ago, we hired this guy who turned out to be a really good partner, worked hard, and never complained. After about a year and a half of working with him I get called into the office, he’s there with the manager, assistant manager and two beefy guys in normal clothes with the exception of earpieces. He wanted to say goodbye to the bosses and me and explain why he had to leave the company. Turned out he was the son of some leader in his country and they had to relocate him, an opposing faction found out he was in our state and would have k*dnapped him for leverage.
My ex.
He had a life with me, his wife, and his colleague girlfriend.
I thought he was separated/divorced, the girlfriend thought I was some psycho stalker ex, and the wife thought I was his partner… in the CIA.
Good times.
I worked with this guy once who was known for his stories. No matter how loose the connection was, he’d find a way to turn anything into a personal anecdote of a thing he’d seen or done before. All of them were interesting the first time (he’d lived an interesting life – growing up in America, moving to Australia in his early 20s, and working in a lot of really cool places over the years), but it wasn’t long before he started repeating the same stories over and over again. I worked with him for just over three years, so it got pretty ridiculous. We knew how he’d met his wife, all the obscure things he owned, his pets, his kids – we knew every detail of his life.
It became a bit of an in-joke within the office about how the guy never shut up.
Then one day, he didn’t come in. He’d died of a heart attack. The whole office was at a loss, especially our little department (which had about 8 people in it, including him). When it came to his funeral, our little group took the afternoon off and attended. And that’s how we found out, none of his stories were true.
He’d grown up locally, his family wasn’t at all who we thought they were, and none of his old jobs had happened… Everything we’d known about him had just been made up.
The most interesting thing for me was that at one point, our boss needed someone to head to China to double-check something in person at one of our company’s factories. When the usual choices couldn’t do it, he was picked. It seemed like a no brainier since he was regularly going to and from America to visit family and had travelled a lot on his other jobs. We now think that may have been his first time overseas.
So went I first left home in my late teens I shared a big house (I think 6+ bedrooms) with a close friend, his brother and some other randoms. Think frat house except for no college/university. Splitting the expenses worked out pretty well. So one of the guys worked at a port in customs or something. He had a uniform and ID etc. Left for work at the same time every morning and hung out with us after work. He was always down for attending social events with us and most of us liked him. Fast forward about a year and he starts telling us about how he can get us discounted TVs and other merchandise from the port. Unclaimed/seized property that apparently no one sweats about if just a few items go astray. Everyone gave it a pass as it seemed sketchy. Then one day we come home to one of our housemates in shock and bawling like a baby. Turns out not only did he give the guy his life savings he also gave him money borrowed from his dad. The customs guy had said he could get him a new car cheap! The long long con. Turns out the guy doesn’t work at the port, the name he gave us doesn’t exist and we have no idea how he spent his days or came up with his share of the rent/bills. Still creeps me out a little knowing I lived with a stranger for so long.
There was this kid at our church who started attending the youth group when he was about 15. Everyone loved him, but he was always a little standoffish. Fast forward 3 years to graduation time. Everyone kept asking him what he planned to do after high school and if he was looking forward to it, but he always changed the subject. Finally, he revealed to one of the adults that he wasn’t graduating because he hasn’t been to school since he was 8 years old. His dad removed him from school and never let him return.
A whole bunch of sh*t went down after that, but the church members helped him do fast-track his degree in 3 years and have now paid for him to attend a 4-year university.
My college roommate’s ex-boyfriend. He pretend to be from England from the day he moved to Michigan including the year they were dating. He would even talk about going back to visit his family. One day (they were already broken up” he said, “I have to tell you something…” and then just totally dropped the accent. He was from Ohio.
The Guy I used to work with. He lived in a small country town with his wife and 3 kids. When he was fired from his job (where I worked) he could only find something at his level in the big city 2 hours away.
So he would go to work in the city Monday to Friday, and home to his wife and kids on the weekends. This went on for years. It came out about 5 years into the arrangement that he wasn’t living in the small crappy city apartment as he said, he was living with his girlfriend, and their 2 kids!
So he had a wife and 3 kids, and a girlfriend with 2 kids (all his). Apparently, the girlfriend knew about the wife, but the wife had no idea about the girlfriend. And his 3 country kids had 2 younger siblings that they knew nothing about.
It of course blew up spectacularly, the wife kicked him out and he went to live with his girlfriend. 6 months later she was sick of him and kicked him to the curb too. So now he pays child support for 5 kids to 2 different women and is actually living in that small crappy apartment!
I worked overnights at a lab, we’d all try and take breaks together, one of the guys would always listen to a weird tales radio show and would bring up some odd topics.
One night it was palm reading. I told everyone about having studied it years ago, and I remembered some of it (70s mysticism movement literature).
So I proceeded to read everyone’s palms, the guy who brought it up went last. Now he was on the short side, a former Marine who was now a lab geek. Looking at his palm told him he has two lifelines, he’s leading a double life and other bs.
He called b*llsh*t and we all went back to work.
Later that night he made an excuse t stop by my desk when everyone else was busy.
Him: “How did you know?”
Me: “How did I know what?”
Him: “About my double life?”
Me: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just read your palm.”
Him: “I’m a cross-dresser. During the day o dress as a woman.”
Me: “Oh.”
A fellow grad student has two young kids; one is struggling to walk and communicate and is in the process of being diagnosed. She is pulling 10-16 hour days (between interning and classes) plus being a mom and wife. She gets a call from a friend that expresses how excited she is to see her at her husband’s work party. What?! She didn’t RSVP, and her husband said he would pop over for less than an hour and then come home to be with her for a quiet dinner. Turns out he was bringing a date that wasn’t her. They had been seeing each other for about 6 months and even had taken a trip together under the pretense of a business trip. Anytime he had been late or gone we assume he was with her. The friend did her a solid and took a couple of pics for the divorce lawyer.
My aunt didn’t come out as a lesbian until she was in her mid-40s. Coming from a pretty traditional Mexican family she was scared that nobody would accept her for who she was, so she hid and lived this double life for the longest time. When she finally came out it caught everyone by surprise, but everyone was extremely supportive of her.
I served in the Navy from 1985 to 2005. While in my first squadron, from 1985-1989, we were away from home often, either on short detachments of 2-5 weeks or 6-month deployments. During one period when we were at home for a while, I was on watch in the duty office after hours. Me and another guy just had to man the office, answer the phone, and monitor the guys on watch down in the hangar bay.
Shortly after our watch started we got a phone call from the wife of someone in our squadron. She was asking us when the squadron would be back from detachment. I asked the other guy if he knew about anybody out on Det, and he just looked at me funny. I told her we didn’t currently have anyone on det. We’ve all been back home for a couple of months. She insisted her husband had been out on det for 3 weeks and needed to know when he was coming home. I assured her nobody was on det, and told her I had seen her husband earlier that day at work. She just hung up after that.
Turns out, the guy was telling his wife he was out on det and with his girlfriend for a few weeks. She called the Commanding Officer to find out when her husband had been part of a detachment and found out he’d done it many times over the previous couple of years. Infidelity is officially against the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It didn’t turn out well for him.
My family hosted a number of exchange students while we were growing up. We hosted about 7 high school students over the course of my childhood; each stayed for a year in our house, attended high school in our town etc. One girl, Irinia, from Russia, came to us no differently than any of the other students had – through the AFS program. To be a student through AFS meant you had to fill out an application, be 17-18 yrs old, be attending high school in your home country, whatever. So Irina arrives as our exchange student. She goes to high school in our small hometown on cape cod Massachusetts. But at Christmas time she says she has to go home to Russia because her mother was extremely sick. Going home during the exchange year is really unusual, really rare. So Ok fine she’s going to Russia for the Christmas break, nbd, she’ll be back in January. Except she never comes back. AFS can’t find her, we don’t know where she is, if she made it to Russia if she’s hurt, nothing. And we’re terrified because we’re her host family during this year and we always took the students in like family. Anyways she’s gone. Maybe 3 months later my mom is driving through our tiny town (again, middle of nowhere cape cod) and she sees Irinia, with what looks like her mom, and some other kids. Turns out Irinia has graduated high school in Russia already, was like 25 with children and had posed as an exchange student so she could ‘case’ the place before bringing the rest of her family.
My ex-stepfather was a well-off pilot for a local med-flight helicopter. He had three daughters who adored him and was always very nice to me and my sister. He was one of the nicest and most soft-spoken men I’ve ever met. He worshipped the ground my mom walked on.
He also had blackout rage issues. After a year of marriage, he gave my mother a concussion and broke her leg in three spots. I was told she slipped and fell. It wasn’t until a couple of years after they split that I was told the whole story. My mom was smart enough to get out while she could and even smarter for not telling me. I was and still am significantly larger than he is and have a lot less to lose.
I’ve seen him once since then. He tried to be nice. I told him I knew everything and if we weren’t at the hospital that my girlfriend worked at, I would most likely have tried to end him.
We don’t talk anymore.
Used to work the desk in an ER. One day, we had a fellow brought in via EMS after a car wreck. After a while, a lady came to the desk and said “My husband is here, he’s just been in a car accident.” I checked with the unit, they said he could have visitors, so I let her go back. I went on with my day.
About 20 minutes later, a different woman came to the desk and said “My husband is here, he’s been in a car accident.” I knew D*mned good and well that we only had one MVA back there, but I asked her for the patient’s name, figuring maybe she’d come to the wrong hospital. But she had not.
Now, it’s not my place to judge other people’s lifestyles. I myself am polyamorous and know a number of people who all refer to one another as husband and wife, though there are more than a regulation number of players on the field.
So, I do my job. I called back and said, “There’s a visitor here for room X, may she come back?” The unit clerk gave the ok, so I opened the door and let her back.
This man was not polyamorous. Instead, he was leading a double life of Bruce Wayne proportions. He wasn’t just sleeping with two different women. He had two sets of children. He had convinced both that he was legally married to them. And neither had any idea the other existed.
There was, how you say, a mild kerfuffle.
In the end, the women joined forces against him and walked out planning their respective divorces.
It was just amazing to me that this guy’s whole life was blown up by a minor fender bender that wasn’t even his fault. Dude looked just haunted when he walked out.
When I did my clinical at a hospital laboratory the lab manager (who had been there for a year or so) was like this SUPER Christian dude- I mean you’d walk by his office and he’d literally be on his knees praying and stuff.
Anyway, one day federal agents show up to the lab and arrest him.
Turns out he had basically fled from Tennessee because he was wanted for committing major tax fraud to the tune of like $400k
IIRC, what he did is file one of those forms that say you don’t have to pay federal income taxes if you are a citizen of another country, except he put on there that he was a citizen of “the kingdom of heaven.”
Somehow they hired this guy without even a basic background check.
The hospital already had a shaky reputation because a year or so before they had killed a woman by giving her the wrong blood type. This didn’t help.
A church preacher regularly gave impassioned sermons on “the evils of alcoholic beverages.”
Yet, he drank heavily and threw parties for his non-church friends where liquor was served in abundance.
About 7 years ago my brother was struggling with addiction, using almost any and everything though alcohol was the DOC. We have a really long family history of alcohol use disorders. He dropped out of school and spent a few years bouncing around treatment centers and sober living houses.
3 years ago he decided to move back (about 2 hours away from my parents’ house) and get back into school. At this point, he’s a lot older than the kids in his classes and socializing is hard so he would come up to see the parents every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He decided to go for a chemistry degree – every semester talking about his specific classes, the content of them, etc. He knew the class times, professors talked about teaching styles, and like clockwork brought his dog to my parents for finals week twice a year so he could study without distraction.
My entire family came from all across the country for his graduation ceremony on Friday. We were all bursting with pride and excitement because my brother had just done what we all thought was impossible and graduated. Pre-ceremony none of us could find his name in the book. Then we couldn’t find him walking among the students. About 30 minutes into the ceremony I got a call from him. He was drunk.
Turns out he never enrolled back into school. He just moved back, conned my parents into paying rent and utilities for 3 years, and spent 4 days a week boozing, gaming, and sleeping. No one knew this was going on. He invested so much into this double life that he had his whole family and all his friends fooled.
We’re not sure what the next steps are, my husband and I are going to help my parents pack up his place tomorrow. It’s hard to find hope with the level of deceit that went into his latest stint. He’s hurt so many people on this path but he’s my brother and I love him nonetheless. Here’s to a brighter tomorrow, thanks for letting my word vomit and process this a bit more.
A while ago I moved to a small town, have a partner, dog, vegetable garden, beautiful apartment, dress in a pretty unspectacular way and work as a teacher. I rarely go out to a party or even stay awake after 11 pm. Only drink wine with dinner and don’t smoke.
But I am originally from the capital city of my country, goth/metal subculture, always walked around heavily styled, always drinking, partying, smoking etc. in my free time when I was younger. Whenever I go there for the weekend to visit friends it’s still like that.
Neither would my metal friends from the capital recognize “small-town me” nor would my small-town friends recognize “capital me” I think.
A few years ago I started a business with a woman friend. As we traveled about, we spent way too much time together and got to know each other really well. Eventually, the secrets started to come out, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so astonished by someone’s story.
This woman was Canadian and had taken a job out of college as a bank teller. She was bored with life and wanted to immigrate to the US, so she embezzled the money from the bank! She leaves the country and changes her name. She gets on with life, making friends, settling into her chosen area. Forsaking her staid, uninteresting life in Canada, she is now into drugs/drink and wild behavior. During a wild rock concert campout she shaves her head ala Britney Spears. It was pretty uncommon for women to have shaved heads back then (mid ’80s) so it would have caught attention. Just after shaving her head, she meets a man who questions the shaved head and she blithely tells him she is in treatment for cancer, what the heck? Except he asks her out. They start dating and it gets serious. His new boyfriend is so supportive he is going to cancer support groups, accompanying her to her dr (which she did a LOT of conniving with to keep him from finding out) and so on. She meets his parents and they oooh and awww over this sweet innocent girl with cancer (who is c*caine chick still, but now secretly). So, a church-going boyfriend proposes and she sees a way out of all of this craziness and says yes. But first, she has to go to a cancer treatment center which is really a drug rehab, so she can get off the dope and really try.
They got married. They were married for 20 years and have a daughter. He and his family still believed she was a good Mormon girl, raised in Utah (she never said she was Canadian, illegally here) and had overcome cancer.
I don’t know the details of how she fell back into dr*gs, or how it came that they found her for embezzlement and illegal status in the country. Or what happened, really. But she is telling me this story it’s ten or so years after being caught. She’s still married to the same man, who now knows everything, but his family does not. Their daughter does not. How they covered up all the stuff that fell out of that, I have no clue.
So, like I said, she’s told me this story in bits and pieces over a week-long work trip we have through Europe. We’ve been in business together for about nine months and it’s going beautifully.
One day I am paying bills for the business and I find that the bank account is overdrafted, which it should not be. Looking into, and talking to her, she has drained our business account of $50,000, for a long weekend in Vegas. She had no intention of telling me. This had just happened the previous week. I’d had no idea she was in Vegas, nor did her husband. She just took the money and went.
I am stunned and don’t know what to do. As business partners, she has complete access to the funds, so it’s not theft or embezzlement. This woman, who had confessed to me as an embezzler, con artist, liar, thief, etc, had totally rooked me. I perceived her as this quiet, easygoing suburban mom type, educated (that was another lie) who had done bad and suffered for it and was rehabilitated. I had no idea what to do and was so personally shocked it’s impossible to describe.
Three days later she died. Of overdose. No one has any freaking idea why she was in California (she lived states away). The unknowns have driven us all crazy trying to figure it out and there are no answers. None. The sad part is her husband and daughter both said it was the best thing that could have happened since shortly after her death more and more stories started coming out. Such as her secret apartment, hidden bank accounts, etc. The financial mess she left behind for everyone is mind-boggling.
Still leaves me gobsmacked when I think about it. Real life is more twisted and bizarre and shocking that any story anyone ever wrote. If someone tried to write a story like this, no one would ever believe it.
My Aunt was dating this dude named Joe. He was a baseball player in minor league systems, single and double A. He was an awesome guy, handsome, funny and people in my family loved Joe. Everyone except for my Grandma, my aunt’s mom. She always confided to other members of the family that Joe seemed like a “closeted fellow”. Which was her way of saying he liked men. Well, it turns out that Joe did indeed like men. My Aunt Dawn grew increasingly suspicious of Joe and started to tail him randomly. She eventually caught him dressing up in drag and going to gay clubs.
I was an intern at a large engineering firm during my senior year of college. I was an Electrical Engineering student and was spending half of my time at the firm as an EE and half in an IT support role. The head of IT was very forward with me and the other young men in the office. It was easy for me to avoid her attention because my GF would have lunch with me at work regularly which helped provide an arms-length relationship with my boss.
One of the other guys wasn’t so lucky. He went drinking with a group of office friends and she showed up. They hooked up, bad idea in principle, but none of us could have guessed how bad.
About a week later he finds flyers posted all around his neighborhood as well as the building we worked in claiming he was a s*xual predator etc.. the flyers had enough detail for him to know it was her. So, he tells the General Manager the story.
This automatically launches an investigation and both are put on leave. The firm hires a PI who goes to work. Within a week the PI determines that the IT Manager wasn’t who she said she was.
Her identity was stolen from a dead person. The college she claimed to have attended didn’t exist (shame on the firm for not checking before hiring her). She had chemically removed her fingerprints (I guess some sort of acid) and refused to give a DNA sample.
Obviously, they fired her and contacted the police. She disappeared and the address on file claimed to have never seen her. They had no answer as to where her mail was going.
The thing was, she was very smart and highly capable across multiple systems. It’s possible she learned this from experience, but I had no reason to question her education and credentials. So, glad I didn’t get caught up in her web.
This was 20 years ago. It had a lasting impact on my personal and professional life.
A manager at a Jimmy John’s I worked at in Cincinnati. He was quiet, kept to himself, and was always on time and did a good job. I was in school so I wasn’t there all the time but when we worked together he was reliable. He was taking online courses at UC (we were literally right across from it) for business, I don’t really remember.
One day, he didn’t show up for work. No one could get ahold of him and no one really knew where he lived (his address was checked, but no one answered). While we were worried, we figured he just bailed and went on with our lives.
Well, one night when the shop was closed (we closed at 3 am) a man knocked on the store door, wanting in. My coworker wasn’t having it and tried ignoring me and mouthing “We’re closed”. She figured it was a drunk student and figured he’d lose interest and leave. Until he held up his badge for Homeland Security.
Apparently, our “missing” manager was a cybercriminal who was using our job and his online courses as a cover to steal money from old folks. Who knew.
My ex lived a double life as both genders. My ex (born male) came out as trans while we were friends. I supported her and through all that a romance blossomed, but little did I know she had a second Facebook where she was identifying as her birth gender intentionally and actually had a whole separate male name than the one she was born with.
She separated her whole friends as the ones she wanted to know her as female and the ones she wanted to know her as male.
During our last 6 months of dating, she had two relationships, one as a female (with me) and one as a male (with another woman). My mom found her male Facebook accidentally and her whole world came crashing down. I guess the other girl found her female Facebook around the same time and my ex was left to spin lies to keep her around (I have no clue if that was successful or not as I didn’t stick around to watch. Lol).
It was the messiest thing I have ever witnessed.
A family friend died at the age of 90+. Sweet old lady, unrelated to us, but in a family for more than 50 years. All Christmas/family occasions were spent together etc. as she had no family on her own. We went to the funeral, and the whole convent turned up. Turns out she was a secret nun, in the monastic order where you don’t wear a habit/robes, and live amongst people. She was always helping others and did lots of charity work.
After my mom and dad got divorced when I was 8, my mom started dating a guy named Lee from work. It was a year after the divorce to clarify. Well this guy was really nice, he treated us all so well and made time for us whenever we had a big event. Over the years he was someone I considered a second dad. So many memories. I could get into more details of how important he was to my mom, my brother and I but it would really drag on.
They started fighting quite a bit during my senior year of high school. It got so bad because people continued to ask why they weren’t getting married, why he has no social media and why he still stays in his own place an hour away after 9 years (he drove to work from another town, he was an assistant manager). He promised nothing was up, she had been to his house, went through his phone (he allowed it) and why she had never met his immediate family yet he has met ours. he said things were just bumpy right now but he wanted to look at houses and rings finally. It got better for a few weeks, then it got crazy.
My mom got a call from someone at work saying they needed to talk about Lee. The lady called that night and told my mom the insane news which might’ve been more obvious than we originally thought. He was living a double life for just shy of 10 years. He was married and had 2 children.. one 5 years old and one a few months!!!! This f*cker would stay the night every other weekend when we weren’t staying with our dad, no clue whose house my mom would go to with him occasionally but must not have been his house spent so much money on us, he was emotionally there for me so many times. After it all came out my mom apologized to us. It wasn’t her fault and we felt terrible for her. Eventually, his sister (who he had told us was mentally unstable.. not true at all) found out and asked to meet with us after hearing the news. She couldn’t believe it. She threw up in our kitchen. His wife was in denial and didn’t want to talk to any of us.
The best part? He told her and his family that he had an affair many years ago with my mom, two times and that was it. He claimed to have no idea who me and my brother were and my mom was lying. We gave them pictures for proof and tried to move on with no contact from them. She had heard from him once since but ignored him and his wife has reached out asking to meet because she finally wants the truth a year after it all. My mom has come a long way. It really messed with us but my mom and dad are back together now. After both being in long-term relationships, I guess it worked out for the best. But I’ll never forgive that man. I hope someday I see him with my boys and it somehow affects him.
7 years ago my wife’s biological father died and had to go back home to Southeast Asia for his funeral. He was well respected in his community and after divorcing my mother-in-law remarried but never had another child.
He was known to have “drinking and gambling” problems, I was told this since I met my wife and would go missing for several days.
At the funeral, my wife, her sister, and my wife’s stepmother met his other wife and daughter.
I don’t think he had a drinking problem or a gambling problem.
When I was 6 years old, my grandfather passed away. He was a very generous man, and always provided for my family. For as much money as he earned, he still lived in the same house for 30 years.
During the funeral, a lot more people showed up than expected. As the minister was delivering his eulogy, he asked for my grandfather’s children to stand.
Hoo boy.
Around 12 or 13 people stood up, not including my dad and aunts and uncles. There was this long, awkward silence as all the half-siblings looked around at each other. That’s when we realized my grandfather was having affairs with multiple women for about 30 years.
Eventually, the awkwardness died down. Everybody got drunk and started dancing to mariachi music afterwards.
The girlfriend I was madly in love with got diagnosed with schizophrenia. Me being the supportive and loving boyfriend stood by her through thick and thin. One day she breaks up with me saying she can’t handle it anymore.
A few weeks later a coworker pulls me aside and tells me that the gf had been lying to me from the get-go. Lied about her job, life etc. Faked schizophrenia to cheat on me and got engaged at that time (she was also cheating on that fiancé). I gotta say, I know a fair amount of people with schizophrenia and she faked it so d*mn well.