scam | The Direction of Intention

Send The Cash [on Not-So-Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on October 26, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

Evidently, we’ve made it to the swanky-wine-promotion-(scam)-list. This came as a text. No words. At first, we treated it as a mystery. A quick Google of the bottle reveals this wine is more expensive than both of our cars combined. “Ooooh, Maybe this is a heads-up! Maybe They’re sending us a bottle!” I suggested.

“Maybe we should call them and tell them to keep the bottle and just send the cash,” Kerri replied.

Victor is Betsy Ade’s manager. He recently posted an attempted scam. Someone wanted to hire Betsy to do a show. They needed to pay with a check and also needed to make it out for a larger amount (insert ridiculous scenario) and requested that Victor return the difference. In the scam world, it’s an old saw. You may or may not be amazed at how many people have reached out to buy paintings but, since they were sailing in the North Atlantic on a scientific expedition, needed to send a too-large-amount-check. After deposit, would it be possible to return the difference?

I’ve thought of papering my bathroom with the schemes, a hall-of-fame for imagination gone bad. To do it, I’d have to print the emails and photos, including the bottle of wine – but I want my paper to be used for worthier causes so I’ve rejected the idea. Plus, the ink would fade over time. I’m having enough trouble with my eyes as it is and don’t want my future self to have to squint to have a chuckle.

“Don’t they know that we’re incapable of enjoying a bottle of wine that costs that much?”

“Yes. We’re goats,” I agreed. “We’d never be able to discern the difference between our wine and this bottle. But, maybe that guy in the North Atlantic would be interested!”

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read Kerri’s blogpost about WINE

Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Random, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, Betsy Ade, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, expensive wine, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, opus one, scam, scams, spam risk, story, studio melange, the melange, wine | 1 Comment »

Live A Great Story [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on February 14, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

I suppose I must not have seen the small print requiring an extra fee for the petals to actually be attached to the stems. Silly me. I’m not a detail guy so it never occurred to me that ordering flowers was like flying on Frontier Airlines: if you want a seat you need to pay extra. If you want wings on the plane there’s an up-charge. If you want the roses fastened to the stem, it’ll-cost-ya.

Every story has a context. Without the context a story cannot be fully understood. Here’s the context for our sad-rose-tale. Kerri and I have out of necessity lived lean. Very lean. This is the first year since we met that I had the capacity to send my wife roses on Valentine’s Day. Context number two: since we spend 24/7 together and she monitors our expenses like a hawk (a necessary practice that comes from living lean) , it’s nigh-on-impossible to surprise her. Fromyouflowers.com seemed to be a solution for a long overdue surprise. “How bad could it be?” I asked myself. Woof.

Never ask yourself a question when you can ask other trusted people. I could have asked Jen or Gay or Jay. They would have warned me off. I could have asked them to arrange roses from a local florist and I would have secretly paid them after the fact. I did none of the above. I was having a nice conversation with myself and, left to my own devices, I’m perfectly capable of making a dumb idea sound titanically smart.

The roses (I use the term loosely) came, not on Valentine’s Day (today), but on Friday. Surprise! Gay’s response after seeing the picture truly captured their state: “Too bad they picked them in August,” she wrote. Even the leaves had abandoned the stems. Brad’s comment was my personal favorite: “How efficient,” he wrote, “you received roses and potpourri in the same order.” Efficiency was, after all, my aim.

Kerri, a gifted transformer of lemons-into-lemonade, separated the dead petals from those few still living and put them in a crystal bowl. And then, she offered me this consolation: “Think of it this way,” she said, “if they’d arrived intact, we’d never remember them. Now we have a great story to tell.”

First roses. A Valentine’s tale. We’ve laughed all weekend [I confess, the humor in the story took me a moment or two to see]. With or without roses, on this day of celebrating true love, this is what I know for certain: we live a great story so we have a great story to tell.

read Kerri’s blogpost about NOT-ROSES