Cider in My Ear

I can't believe I fell for it.  Me.  The scam-savvy New Yorker.  Always with one hand lightly covering my wallet (front jeans pocket - much harder to get at unnoticed) as I hang onto the subway strap with the other.  Always giving the three-card monte dealers a wide berth.  Always hitting DELETE with that cool, supercilious sneer when I receive the email claiming that my son (who is fast asleep in the next room) finds himself destitute and passport-less in Prague, begging me to provide my credit card number at once in order to save him from sleeping under a leaky bridge, where he will undoubtedly be sexually ravished again and again, after being forcibly injected with drugs not legally available in the United States.

But - they got me. They got me.  They got me good.  They got me with a little postcard that offered me two free airfares, or a free stay at Great Wolf Lodge.  And all I had to do was listen to a boring 90 minute sales pitch for a timeshare, somewhere out in the Poconos.

Well - it's springtime.  And the Poconos are pretty in the springtime. And I know how to say, "No, thanks" and I know how to keep saying "No, thanks," for 90 minutes, right?  And it's a Sunday, and we're not doing anything else, and my Brother the Lifelong Bachelor has been hocking us to come see the enormous house he bought in California and stay in one of his four guestrooms, because for a week he can sacrifice the joy of rattling around in that great big house all by himself for the sake of Family.  I don't want to stay at Great Wolf Lodge, because I already did that when my son was 11, and I already know that Great Wolf Lodge is no place for adults who are not trying to make a child under the age of 12 happy (as opposed to making themselves happy) while on vacation.  But free airfares?  Hey!  What could be the downside?  What's the worst that could happen?  Right?  Right?

The worst of it is, I know perfectly well that "You can't cheat an honest man."  And that, "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is."  And even, "If somebody is offering you something valuable for nothing, you should run like hell in the other direction, because there's definitely a hidden agenda and it will turn out there is more in it for them than there is for you, if you are greedy and stupid enough to accept."

But I did my homework.  I asked all the right questions over the phone when I set up the appointment.  Hell - I even put my husband on with their operator, and he asked the questions I hadn't thought to ask.  It all sounded okay, so I called up my friend Carrie and said, "Hey, you want to drive out to the Poconos with us and be bored by a timeshare pitch so we can get free airline tickets and a $100 dining card?  Afterwards we can grab lunch and then drive up to the new house and see how the bathrooms are turning out."  Carrie, the darling, is always up for the impromptu adventure, so off we toddled.

The drive to the resort took almost 2 hours, and along the way we had time to relate in detail all the timeshare pitch horror stories that had happened to us, to our friends, and to our families.  The countryside was nice enough, but the area was depressed - lots of ramshackle houses and farms that needed nothing more than a fairly strong gust of wind to turn them into kindling.  Rusted-out automobiles in the front yards.  The kind of ambiance that really says luxury vacation resort.

We were gaping at each other and saying, "Are they kidding?" before we even got to the Lodge, or whatever it was called.  The timeshares turned out to be little prefab trailer homes that had been plunked down here and there on a large tract of Absolutely Nothing.  The Lodge reminded me of the YMCA in my home town in the 1960's.  There was a sad little swimming pool right behind it that was shaped like a bow-tie pasta noodle and had all of its painting peeling off; with a tiny peeling  in-ground whirlpool tub to match sitting desolately to one side.  To welcome us on that true luxury resort pampering note, somebody had set out a plastic bowl of generic potato chips and a pile of paper plates.

Having come this far, Carrie decided she might as well get her free airline tickets, too, so she blandly announced she'd forgotten her voucher but would come along for the tour.  The elderly youth behind the desk looked flustered and asked whether we had all traveled together.  Surprised, we allowed as how we'd traveled in the same car, but were of different households and addresses, and the elderly youth, growing still more flustered, announced that, this being the case, Carrie could take the tour, but the rules of the Free Gift specifically prohibited arriving in the same car, and so, alas, she was ineligible for free airline tickets.

With that fine, stern hauteur that I have seen Carrie produce whenever the occasion seems to warrant it, Carrie announced in return that she had been going to buy a timeshare; that she had been yearning to buy a timeshare; that she had arrived, checkbook in hand, with the firm intention of buying a timeshare - but, if that was they way he was going to be, then she would buy no timeshare, no, neither on this day nor any other.  And that, moreover, her two dear friends would not be buying any timeshares, either.  We would take the tour.  We would listen to the sales pitch.  We would collect our free airfares, not to mention the hundred dollar gift certificate to the Fine Dining Establishment of Our Choice.  But she would personally guarantee that no timeshare would be bought by any one of the three of us on that ill-starred Sunday.

We then retired to the Naugahyde sofas to await our turn to "get this bullshit over with," as we muttered to one another.

As we waited, the room began to fill up.  More and more nervous-looking people trotted in, print-outs in hand, to grab at the brass ring.  I couldn't help noticing that most of the people who came in looked like they didn't have a lot of money that they could comfortably afford to lose.  Many of them had children in tow; you could see that they were here because taking their kids on a two-night stay at an indoor water park was a splurge they normally wouldn't have indulged in.  Anxiety was in the air.  Behind the glass wall of the waiting room, I could see the salespeople.  They didn't look like they liked their jobs.  They merely looked like they didn't have enough money to live on if they didn't put on a cheap business suit and try to peddle a white elephant to people who had as little as, or maybe even less than, they did.

Ours were the first names called.  A hard-faced woman, dislike for us, her job, and everyone on earth deeply etched on every lineament, summoned the three of us into an office marked MANAGER. Surveying us in the way she might have surveyed a colony of bedbugs that had just turned up under the cushions of a secondhand sofa she'd been about to buy, she informed us that she understood that we were not happy with the fact that Carrie was ineligible for the the Free Gift.  We agreed that we were Not Happy.  She said that there was a backlog of clients on the other side of that glass wall, feverishly awaiting their guided tour of Shangri-la so they could buy their timeshares, and so she was willing to award my husband and me our Free Gift without forcing us to endure the tedium of the 90 minute sales pitch and send us on our way.

"And the hundred dollar dining card, of course," I said.

"Of course," she said horridly, and went off for our voucher.  This turned out to be a computer printout enclosed in a flimsy folder of magazine-grade gloss stock embellished with pictures of palm trees.  It was also the voucher for Great Wolf Lodge trip, and I pointed out her mistake, and she apologized still more horridly and came back with a different computer printout.  We thanked her nicely and took our departure.

Before we left, Carrie and I went downstairs to use the Ladies' Room - an opulent affair boasting three stalls with metal doors exactly like the ones I recall as being in my high school's bathrooms in the late 1970's.  Carrie went to rinse her hands and started laughing hysterically, pointing at the bunch of artificial flowers meant to enliven the sink, upon which somebody had propped a handwritten note:

DON'T BUY

IT'S A SCAM!

In the car, I read the Fine Print, of which there was a considerable amount.  We were required to fork over $75 per person in Fees, half of it payable within the next 21 days, the rest upon making our airline reservations, and to agree to pay any other Taxes and Fees that might arise.  We were darkly warned that if we did not send a money order for $75 via Certified Mail within the next 21 days, our Free Gift would become Null and Void.

As for the Dining Card, it turned out that it was, in fact, good in quite a number of reasonably decent restaurants - we just had to spend an equal amount in order to use it.  In short, it was a 50% Off card, good for up to $100.  

I wish I could say that at this point, I had simply laughed, cut my losses (a tank of gas, an afternoon on the road, and a lunch in a Pennsylvania diner I wouldn't have had to buy if I'd torn up the silly postcard in the first place) and shredded the voucher.  But no.  Painful and embarrassing as this is to confess, I actually stopped at the bank and got a $75 money order this morning.  Luckily for me, my particular bank doesn't charge a fee for money orders.

And here, in my particular case, is where the scam stopped.  Why?  Because, faced with the fact that I was next going to have to stand in one of those interminable post office lines to send the money order off by certified mail, I finally decided to do the sensible thing and first get online to investigate any consumer complaints that might exist regarding the travel agency that handled the "free airline tickets" vouchers.  What I found was hair-raising.

The Better Business Bureau gives this company an F.  Customer complaints amply document how they earned it.  Same story as mine - it was just that the people who did follow through and mail their vouchers in with those money orders unwittingly embarked on a nightmare mess in which they were incessantly nickled and dimed for one sum after another, the promised tickets never appearing, because the company had the option to say that there were no availabilities on the two dates you were permitted to select at a time, and because they were allowed to take 45 days to tell you so.  Since the vouchers expire within 18 months, and since they hit you up for more money each time you try to make the reservation, some of which is non-refundable, they have a nice little shell game going.  And since all of this is presented to you in writing, in clear and comprehensible language, albeit in minuscule print, and since you fork over the money in small increments as you go further and further along the path the perdition, they have no legal liability and you can't claim you were scammed.

The success of this scheme relies on the very sound psychological principles that:

(1) Most people want to get something for nothing. Especially if it's dressed up to look like it's foolproof.

(2) Once these same people have invested something in this "free" item - whether it be money, time, energy, or what have you - they will be extremely reluctant to abandon the quest for the carrot at the end of the stick, which the scammer keeps jerking along, just out of reach, but always in plain sight.  As long as the scammer never asks for a large sum, which would create alarm and resistance, the victim can be diddled indefinitely for smaller amounts that will add up to a tidy sum over time.  (And I of all people should know this, having read Joe Brown's incomparable novel Addie Pray, on which the film Paper Moon is based, at least a dozen times.)

So - I'm out an afternoon, a tank of gas, the price of a lunch, and some self-respect. And I can afford that, and I can laugh at myself, and I can thank goodness my husband and my friend are the forgiving sort.

But what about all the people I saw on the other side of that glass wall?  The people who looked like they had an old car that got them there, and a dream of a nice vacation for their kids, but not much else?

It bothers me considerably that many of them are going to stay on this train to nowhere, and that nobody is looking out for them.  It bothers me that it is perfectly legal for bogus companies like this to take advantage of the gullibility of people who don't have a lot of money, but who do have the very human desire to take a nice vacation with their kids at a discounted price.  It bothers me that these people are in for months of frustration, disillusionment, and being swindled out of money that they hadn't intended to spend.  Oh, yes -eventually, they will get the airline tickets, or the stay in the lodge, or any of a number of other things this company promises.  But by the time they do get it, they will have spent, bit by bit, almost the full price of the trip - the very same amount they would have spent if they had simply booked the trip they couldn't afford to take through legitimate channels.  Or maybe even more.

And so, Gentle Readers, in the immortal words of Guys and Dolls' Sky Masterson:

On the day when I left home to make my way in the world, my daddy took me to one side. “Son,” my daddy says to me, “I am sorry I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having the necessary lettuce to get you rolling, instead I’m going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.