h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've no time to give a full account of how it happened...
But I managed to hand £15 quid that I couldn't afford to lose to a grifter/confidence trickster.
I thought I'd play along with this guy that was asking for my monetery assistance until I could be more sure that I wasn't turning away someone genuinely in need of a "good samaritan"... But it didn't work out how I'd planned, I ended up giving my money to this trickster, wasting 2 hours of my day and feeling like the cretinous fool I am...

Still my woes are small compared to many others.

It happens to all of us, one time or another... I'm sorry it was so much, I know you're never rich enough to waste any.

There was this teenage girl flogging her 'Pencil drawings', knocking on our door. Not very brilliant work but nice enough, I thought pictures of cats and dogs for the kids would be OK, and her being a poor polish student and all...

But I had cash not even for one pic. And oddly she quickly reduced the price, sold me one and disappeared.

Of course only the 'signature' was her hand, pencilled there, the rest of the picture was a photocopy of somebody's pencil drawing... Nice heavy paper though. I paid only about 2 quid, but it was probably worth all of 20 pence!

Milla

2 quid! You got off lightly. I paid £10 to the poor Polish student at *my* front door for a photocopy of a windmill. It was the only one he had that wasn't of barfingly cute baby animals. I haven't been able to look at the picture since.

So now at least we've taugth ourselves not to buy anything photocopied from Polish students. (I did go for the barfingly cute kittens).
Wonder if they study shoe-Polish or silver-Polish?

Milla

Sorry to hear about your woes, though, Nyxkind. It is so frustrating when you know *exactly* what they're up to and they *still* get one over on you!

A friend of mine got collared by a guy in the street selling membership to the RAC. My friend, who does all he can to avoid those awful street vendors, coughed up about £100, and he didn't even have a car!

A friend of mine can usually spot them coming- he asks for money before they can even open their mouths.

He asks *them* for money? There's an idea!

Part of what galls to me about it, is as Snailrind hinted, that I had a good idea of what this guy was upto, but for reasons/issues of my own wanted to test my ability to trust someone, a stranger... hence going along with it until no doubt was left...

But somehow he got me to hand over the money, when I wasn't ready to and more than that, was increasingly aware of big holes in his story... Perhaps because I wasn’t able to muster the assertiveness to cut across his mix of friendly banter and despairing at the plight of his car…

What was his story?

Wholes in his story is perhaps the wrong way of putting it... 'Wholes in his behaviour relative to his story as first put to me' might cover it.

I don't really want to go into his story... Not because I'm embaressed to relate it, but because I just want to forget about it sooner rather than later.