Unfortunately, at some point or another, everyone gets duped or at least encounters instances that are truly bizarre.
Years ago in college, a friend moved to St. Louis with her family, but she frequently came back to visit. On one such visit, another fiend and I went to pick her up from Union Station where she was taking the train in, but before we got into the building, a quick-change artist approached my friend and scammed him out of ten dollars by asking him to break a ten and quickly shuffling around bills until he was out the ten bucks.
A few years later, when my wife and I opened a coffee house in Park Ridge, my wife’s uncle, who was a successful area business owner for a number of years by then, warned us about being approached by the mob.
I looked at my wife’s uncle like he were nuts, and said in open mockery, “Okay. It’s Park Ridge 1999 not 1960s Hell’s Kitchen.”
But a just a few weeks later, a man walked into our coffee house. He was an average-looking guy, nothing very Mafioso about him (on the surface), but he started asking me what kind of protection we had. I pointed to a sign on the door and informed him we had an alarm. With barely a glance at the door, he said again, “No, I’m asking what kind of protection you have for before you get robbed.” I told him none, I guess, but that I wasn’t too worried. It was Park Ridge.
This was good news to the man because he told me that he and his friends could offer my business protection and bring in lots of additional business and all we had to do was give them a very small percentage of our weekly revenue.
I told him, no, of course…in the most polite way possible.
Flash forward to the first couple years of the Sun Day when someone stole our advertising in one edition. I’m going to skip the particulars because it’s recent history and very complicated to explain, but I don’t mean a competitor beat us out in selling a prospective client advertising space. That happens all the time. That’s competition. I mean someone actually stole ad space right out of an edition. Something that should be impossible because ad space isn’t a product on a shelf you can shoplift, but this person figured out how to steal it, none the less.
But for all these weird instances or dupes, it wasn’t until recently that I duped myself.
And all it took was a near-three year old to manipulate it.
Even long before my wife was pregnant, I decided to stave off smart phones as long as I could from my child. In a way, I had a rather archaic view of them that wasn’t dissimilar to calling a TV the Idiot Box. In short, I simply thought phones would more damage to the developing mind than good.
My wife, on other hand, is much more accepting of technology and saw nothing wrong with letting our son, who’ll be three in November, build a relationship with her phone. And from the moment she placed it in his hands, it became love at first sight.
In just a few months, my son has become almost fully adept at using a smartphone. The only things he can’t do yet are download apps on his own (thank goodness) and make calls. Though he has attempted plenty that go something like 5461718536******4545#######564845**45416. I’m not sure who he’s calling, but I’m pretty sure the person isn’t from this planet.
At first, my wife and son happily shared her phone. In fact, it warmed my heart a little, watching her download him games and teach him how to play them, but the more proficient and adept he became at the phone, the less he needed her help so the more he wanted to the phone for himself until it got to a point where he’d sneak into the room while she slept and nab her phone off the nightstand.
Things reached a critical point one day when my wife was yelling at me because our son was using the phone so much and not allowing her the time she wanted to use the phone. Of course, my thought was What did you expect to happen when you printed his thumbprint into your phone? Serves you right, if you ask me. Then when my wife would take the phone away from our son, he’d yell gibberish at me because he no longer had the phone. If I could speak toddler, I’m sure it would have went something like, “She’s so unfair! It’s my turn!”
One particular morning, I got so fed up with this argument, that I said, “That’s it!” Then I went onto Amazon and ordered my son an iPod, which is like an iPhone without cellular connectivity, and my wife a new iPad as a backup to her phone. I felt better almost immediately. Problem solved.
Later that day, I iterated the entire story to my friend, and my friend said, “So you basically rewarded your wife and your son for misbehaving.”
“Yeah, no. What? Wait,” I stammered, spending a lot of time thinking. “Well, fine,” I said. “When you put it like that.”
