Taking the middle road, I tugged out a $20 bill and handed it to her, along with my business card.
"And, of course, I'll want your name and address," I said, proud that I had finally, um, gotten the upper hand. She scribbled her name, address and phone number on the back of another card and handed it to me. "Thank you," she said, clutching my hand in both of hers. "I'll send the money right away."
Sure, I said, giving her -- how it pains me to say this now -- a hug and admonishing her sternly to join AAA. She was even wearing nice perfume.
Nora and I quickly got into the car and drove off. Once behind the wheel, I felt my head clearing, like a spilled river rafter who gets popped out of a vortex and is able to take a big gulp of air. I reached for my cellphone, heedless of the late hour, and dialed the number the woman had written. The folks who answered had no idea who "B. Hill" was.
I felt like such a knucklehead. I was sputtering with rage, deriding myself as a patsy, a loser, a jerk.
The next morning, I took Nora to a play date. She couldn't wait to tell her friend's dad what had happened. Amazingly, the dad, Jim Davis, revealed that he too had gotten suckered by the same scheme, in downtown Los Angeles. He had forked over $20 to a woman who had asked him to call AAA.
Here I was kicking myself for being a dodo and along comes a brainy guy, who happens to be the associate vice chancellor of information technology at UCLA, to ease my pain.
"I really did want to help someone," Davis said, adding that he had put the odds of getting his money back at 30-70.
Still, he acknowledged, after several days had gone by and it was apparent that he had been taken, "I was a little frustrated."
When I learned a couple of days later that a colleague had also succumbed to the same scam -- near his kid's school, no less -- I figured we'd reached critical mass. Was some Southland entrepreneur running seminars?
Weeks have passed, but my emotions are still surprisingly raw. The experts who study this stuff -- social psychologists -- have helped me understand what happened.
"She was playing on your expectations," said Michael J. Gill, an assistant professor of social psychology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. "Most scam artists will not look like middle-class or upper-middle-class professionals. That was a very clever addition to her routine.
"I imagine," he added, "that she tried to give you as little time to think as possible." Bingo!
