We usually come up to a point in our lives when we find out someone we trust is lying to us. It's nearly impossible to live without knowing at least one such person (it could even be you). We have all seen such disasters happen in movies, but I think you know what it feels like in real life. It feels like pure betrayal of the worst kind. Sometimes a blatant lie is better than exaggeration. I remember a friend who had the bad habit of overexaggerating matters, keeping the rest of us in the team thinking that there was a political problem. I was also one person who would do the same.
Work/Office politics is unavoidable at any point in your life. You know it's going to happen. If you're lucky enough to not have much problems in your work life, you'd probably seen it happening in school if you were active in activities. People would be plotting extravagant schemes to keep this person out of this, try to do this to that and trying to keep things together etc. You might even find yourself in the battle you weren't involved in at any time, but you were convinced you were. This changes when something happens later in your life.
I'm 18 now. I've seen about four occurences of bad occurences of work politics. I remember when I tried to create a wall between parties that start splitting up, and eventually gave up when neither side would take the proper side of the wall. I remember thinking I was on one side of a political war when I found out that there was no war, it was just an exaggeration by one of my colleagues who wanted to fight a war that didn't exist! Then, I remember there was a problem later in my life, but this one was the only one that didn't turn ugly. It worked out fine, and we all realised how stupid we were to be fighting over such trvial things. Then, I started working at IT Planet, and I didn't know I'd gotten on the bad side of some people until the time I was about to leave and didn't care anymore. *sweats* Heck, nobody told me, not even the manager (or anyone that was supposedly on my side of the politics)! Everybody knew about this problem except me, which was kinda funny for me (apparently, I was disturbing their work at some points in time, which nobody told me off, which they should have *sweats more*. Of course, I think it might have been just another exaggerated thing anyway, because I think that not everyone believed that person completely. :D
Finding out who's telling the truth is usually a lot harder than it seems. Thankfully, it hasn't been such a problem. While I was disappointed about IT Planet, I found out that the division was actually between old-timers and new workers. The old-timers were prejudiced against new hires, and weren't very receptive when it came to new people. They weren't friendly, and refused to help with our training, despite the fact that they were told to, and when I decided that learning would need to take a new turn, they began to not like me! :D
Now, let's clarify: who's telling the truth? Usually you won't know until you actually look on the other side of the fence. I needed to see the other side of the fence every time a problem came up. People you don't trust fully are usually more reliable sources of information than people on your side of the fence. They show you the other side of the story and usually help you to figure out which side of the fence you want to be on. It can help you settle arguments easily, as well as make you the power figure in the battle, being able to see both sides of the problem, you can usually try to solve it without too much fuss.