Comment by chimeracoder

> Obviously? I think I've had this phone call myself a few times, although in my experience it was never from a statistician and they didn't give me as much data, but I'm pretty sure the story is mostly accurate.

Yeah, the original retelling even states up-front:

> The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

It's pretty common to alter minor details of stories in order to make them easier to follow, not to mention that the entire account is also written several years after it happened, when details are presumably less likely to be completely accurate. Obviously the dialogue is reconstructive for narrative ease; no reader would look at that and assume it's intended to be a verbatim transcript.

Unless the author here can cite specific things that make it truly impossible for anything of that shape to have occurred, I'm not seeing anything that justifies the conclusion "there's a lot to the story that's obviously made up".