Rope Me Into Your Schemes

It was around midday of Tuesday last week, while my housemate was at uni and I was home alone, that I heard the knock at the door. A chirpy man from India or one of its neighboring countries stood before me adorned in the all-black uniform of EnergyAustralia and brandishing a tablet PC in his left hand. In passive, friendly and yet forceful manner he proceeded to grill me about my current electricity and gas providers. Before I knew it I had somehow been handed a phone and I was now talking with customer services and signing up for a new gas and electricity contract with EnergyAustralia (and yes they do spell it as one word with two capitol letter just like that). How the fuck had this happened? Looking back I think it was just me initially thinking the man was from my provider and was making a customer courtesy call to make sure I was getting the best deal from them or whatever. Then after realizing this wasn't the case a combination of my natural social submissiveness and this mans powerful salesmanship meant that this train was now moving way too fast for me to stop. Lucky for me this suited our household because what EnergyAustralia offered us was indeed a better deal that would ultimately save us a reasonable sum of money in the long term. So from my point of view I saw this outcome as a win-win situation. On the one hand I got a better deal. On the other hand I had learnt a valuable lesson about myself and vowed to correct this behavior now that I had been made aware of it.

I knew you were trouble when you walked in.

Skip forward a few days til Thursday. I was in the C.B.D. and was about to head home when I remembered several grocery items we were in need of at home. As I approached the entrance to the supermarket I was stopped by a pair of young ladies selling raffle tickets at a little bench set up just outside.
"Would you like to buy a raffle ticket?"
A raffle, I thought, how quaint. As I imagined all the attention I'd get on Facebook if I uploaded a series of photos of myself posing seductively with a wheelbarrow full of groceries I'd won in a raffle, I asked the lady the first of two key questions.
"What's the prize?"

Turns out there were a few prizes, a number of sizable cash prizes as well as a million dollar prize home! Fuck, forget Facebook likes, I thought, people will actually like me in real life with that. Impressed so far I asked the second key question.
"How much are the tickets?"
I might just go nuts here and buy like 50. I won't look insane because the money is being donated to a hospital and I could just as easily come across as charitable.
"It's $30 for 150 tickets."
My heart sank a little. Everyone is forced to buy in bulk. This means that to get the competitive edge I'd really have to do a number on my bank account. But nevertheless I went along with it and agreed that $30 this one time wouldn't be a stupid amount to spend for a good cause where the prize is also so impressive. The odds of winning would also be much better than with the lottery or pokie machines. So I proceeded to fill out the little form so that I could be contacted if I won something and properly billed for the tickets. Then about halfway through I noticed something.
"Umm...excuse me. It says here 'I understand that this is not a one-off ticket purchase' and 'I understand that this is an ongoing monthly financial commitment'?"
"Oh yeah" she said "there's a draw every month and this is just making sure you're always in it. You can call us anytime and change this. You can drop down to $5 a month later on if you like?"
It was then the penny dropped. I had been played expertly by this woman and not in a fun sexual way. I knew that I was in deep but if I was an assertive enough person I had been presented with a way out. I didn't have all the facts when I was signing up and we both knew it. It would be perfectly reasonable of me to say "I'm sorry, I wasn't aware of that and I'm really not interested."
So I opened my mouth and said "how do I pay for this?"
"Credit card or direct debit."
"I'll do card then."

You lost. Thanks for playing.

So the past week has been one hell of a week for teaching me a personal truth to which I had been previously unaware; I am a massive sucker. That's not to say I'm gullible and believe everything I'm told, but that I don't posses the social and personal confidence to challenge the person trying to rope me in. Which in a way is somehow worse, because I'm acutely aware that I'm making a bad decision I'll regret while I'm still in the process of making it. My life is Peep Show and I'm Mark Corrigan. However, all is not lost. I still have an ace up my sleeve. This is something I actually discovered many years ago now after a friendly German exchange student managed to charm me into donating money to the heart foundation. I might find it really hard to stop the pretty lady or the polite foreigner from roping me into these schemes. But at the end of the day, after we've said our goodbyes and I've been thanked for being such a kind person (sucker) I can still quite confidently call up to organisation and cancel my membership over the phone. Because no matter how friendly, charming and coercive the people they send out for the face-to-face stuff you can be almost certain that they'll still have an unhelpful, moody twat manning the phone lines who you will happily and easily be able to say no to.