How to be a really bad (stalking) target

This piece is for you to pass to grandma and grandpa (unless you are grandma).

I met a nice pair of ladies, out at my roadside honor vegetable stand. Subsequently and randomly the younger one (a redhead) showed up from time to time to help me pick tomatoes and squash early in the morning.  Happy to have the company, I was charmed.  Later in the summer mom came along and bought some baskets and vases for a wedding she was doing – again it was not a waste of time and they were charming. In case you don’t know, Zeke and I don’t have a lot of visitors (at least I don’t), but in vegetable season there are neighbors who enjoy my garden almost every day. The redhead must have come a half dozen times and mom twice.

Last weekend, summer long over, they popped in on a Sunday and visited the greenhouse and picked up some decorations and vases. Both charming, mom breathless, they hit me with the pitch.  What I really needed to do was come to a full day seminar with them – it would be really well worth it --- trust them.  Repetition of the invitation – almost insistence – got me to say ‘I’ll think about it.’

Of course the internet told me that this was all part of the Landmark pyramid scheme (a descendant of Erhard Seminar Training) which insidiously invites vulnerable people to free short seminar and then longer seminars for a small fees  and then the fees increase and once they are imbedded in your life they get imbedded in your finances.  They are patient – they wait for the elderly to enter into decline.

I was at the gateway, but nevertheless I was shocked that they had been essentially stalking me all summer long and were giving their gateway pitch, foolishly, to the wrong guy. They may not even be the perps in the scheme, since the design is to hook multitudes to the free seminars and use them to recruit more participants so they can target the best ones.  My ‘mom and redhead’ might just be pawns.

The census lady told me that 30% of households are single person, mostly older.  How many of them are being stalked?  How many of them become victims of persuasive rhetoric?  Maybe I should volunteer to the D.A.’s office to go undercover? Nope, that would be out of character.

Come to think of it, they never paid me for the vases and decorations.