"A Boob Job With a Chainsaw"
A cautionary tale: don't get scammed by not trusting your gut
Pictured associated with this post: a frame of the Anime Chainsaw Man. Credits to Mappa. The following post does not involve Chainsaw Man but does mention chainsaws once—and memorably. Hence the title of the piece.
They say that what you do on the first day of the year sets the tone for the rest of the year.
Selfishly speaking, I sure as hell hope not.
I spent the first few hours of 2023 down by four-hundred bucks by a car repair scam. In a Kroger parking lot. In broad daylight.
Allow me to explain myself.
On the morning of January 1, 2023, I was physically tired from being out past midnight and had compounded my own fatigue from the very statement that started this post: my resolutions include doing cardio four times a week, and I had figured there was no better day to reinforce this than on the first day of the year. Underslept, I dripped in sweat riding a bike for an hour while listening to a David Goggins audiobook tell me to quit whining about how tired I was and to become “a hard motherfucker.”
By the time I rolled into the Kroger parking lot to get some staples and go back home, I wasn’t just physically diminished by the exercise and mentally diminished by the Goggins’ latest diatribes in a chapter of Never Finished. I was emotionally vulnerable, too, and all over a Subaru Forester.
The Subaru that saw me and my fiancé across the country had sustained a ding in a garage in Austin, TX about a year and a half ago that Bug and I never took the time to get fixed. It was a subtle eyesore, but I tried not think of it much until my mom started talking about trading in the car, and then we started talking about trading in the car. It had a lot of miles on it. It had at least one possible recall warning on its record. But it was a vehicle that had served as our literal transportation on our adventure of a lifetime (so far), and it was also a vehicle for our memories.
We set a date in January to obtain a new car and trade in the Subaru, effectively a “death warrant” for the beloved Subaru. Putting that date on the calendar spurred my sudden, intense sentimentality over the car. I hadn’t cared to fix the dent for a year and a half, but now I treasured my inanimate scrap of seats and metal obscenely, wanting to “do right by the car” in our final weeks together, all the while knowing that these feelings were laughably one-sided. A car cannot return love.
If my car could express feelings, after what happened last week, it would be probably spew anger, pain, and vitriol: spitting oil in my face, leaking anti-freeze, letting a fuse explode, all to say, “How could you have possibly let this happen to me?”
If you’ve read this far, you can probably understand why, when a scammer caught me in a parking lot and insisted he could fix my car on New Year’s Day, I didn’t have the soundness of mind or body to really challenge him at full force.
That’s not to say I didn’t challenge the guy at all. For example:
I tried to walk away and ignore him
I asked him for a card or number to call to obtain his so-called “services” at a different time
I asked him why he could only accept cash and not a service like Venmo or Zelle.
But being tired and sentimental made me even more vulnerable than I was already in this circumstance: a woman alone and uninformed about cars up against a man feigning expertise and who would not take ‘no’ for an answer.
It didn’t help that I disregarded a bunch of my own inner warning signs, answering my own legitimate questions with "logical” answers instead of seeing my own curiosity as a red flag and trying to evacuate myself from the situation.
Why would a guy who claims he works as a repairman for Subaru be driving around a beat-up Honda? Maybe he just takes care of other people’s cars more than spending time on his own, or this is his new “project” to fix.
If this guy works in a body shop, why is his handshake so weak and hand so smooth? I’d expect a mechanic to have more of a bite, but maybe I’m being too judgmental. It’s not like I know a ton of mechanics.
Why is he insisting I stay in the car while he conducts the repair? He said he needed me to hold the brake pedal and maybe he’s trying to spare me the fumes from the paint…but if the fumes are so bad, it seems weird that he isn’t wearing a mask or anything…unless he’s just used to it.
At a certain point, I could no longer reason with myself. In deep and forced to let the guy finish what I’d soon realize was a hack job, I figured I’d either gotten a great deal or had gotten mercilessly duped and fucked over.
Not like you have to guess, but it was the latter.
Right before the guy drove away with my cash, he obliged my request for a number to contact him for any future work. When I texted the number he (finally) provided to thank him, it came back with an automated text. It was a landline.
No question, I’d been fooled.
I drove home, feeling very foolish at the mint-green Turtle Wax spackled near the headlight on the driver’s side.
“How bad is it?” I asked Bug, who knows more about car than I do and could be counted on to provide a candid, even if ungracious, perspective of the circumstances.
“As far as body work goes, this looks like a boob job with a chainsaw.”
If I had trusted my instinct on something being not-quite-right instead of trying to rationalize the oddness of the situation, I would have walked in and out of the supermarket with my groceries, into my mildly-dinged car, and driven back home for a leisurely rest of day of ringing into the New Year.
Instead, I spent the afternoon in tears, frustrated that I’d lost four-hundred bucks and sad that my well-intentioned (even if highly-emotional) desire to repair the car led me down a hasty path that further damaged the car. Most of all, I was embarrassed and upset at myself. How I could have been so foolish?
I wish I had been quicker to trust a gut feeling that maybe—just maybe—this guy was not "doing me a favor,” “looking out for me,” and “putting blessings out into the world” or whatever vaguely religious statement he repeated in order to reel me in.
I wish I had called Bug or recalled enough of the specifics of what needed to be repaired on the car so that I could authoritatively call bullshit on the scammer’s quote.
I wish I had been more of a skeptic and considered the worst possible outcome as much as the best potential outcome in the situation. Perhaps this was not “The Universe” having heard some prayer or intention of mine to send the car off “healthy and well” and in its best possible condition to the trade-in in a few weeks. Perhaps it was what it actually was: a stranger with bad tattoos masquerading as an expert, and who saw me as an easy target for a quick buck.
Instead, I wanted to believe that sometimes things are as good as they seem and that a stranger could be kind, especially on New Year’s Day, setting a tone of karmic goodwill for the rest of the year.
I paid for that in more way than one, and now I can only hope the other guy gets his due.
The truth is, something like this could happen to anyone, and it does, sometimes with more expensive and harder-to-remedy consequences.
He could have damaged my car to the point of it being dangerous to drive.
He could have followed me to the ATM and forced me to clear my accounts.
He could have had a knife or a gun or forced me to another location where I would be at serious risk of harm.
I could have lost a lot more than four hundred bucks and my pride.
In the wake of being scammed, I spent the last week digging into Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift of Fear (1997) and rereading Jia Tolentino’s essay from Trick Mirror, “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” (audio available here). Both these works have been a reminder to me that anyone, no matter their credentials or their usual qualities of judgment, can be fooled. Need another example? Look no further than the scandal of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Continuing to use myself as an example and cautionary tale: I would like to think that having an MIT degree means that I am somewhat smart. I would also like to think that training a sport that is advertised as a means for self-defense means that I might be better at sniffing out and defending myself against a predator than the average person. That type of thinking is dangerous and flawed: my education in a classroom or a combat sport is not substitute for trusting my gut enough to remove myself from a bad situation. If anything, that education probably undermined my gut.
But even a no-BS, “street smart'“ person can be defrauded. My dad remains the most no-BS, “street smart” person I have ever known, and he had been scammed in his own law office by a woman who had worked for him as a bookkeeper for almost twenty years. Justice got served in that case: she “FAAFO-ed”, so to speak, and found herself behind bars for a few years. But even the man who refused to be anybody’s fool, who trusted no one and believed the world was out to get him, could be fooled and “gotten”, too.
In BJJ, my first coach liked to say with regard to learning how to escape a bad position that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In context, he meant that we were better off knowing how to identify and avoid the bad position than getting caught in it and having to fight our way out. It wasn’t that we didn’t need to know a cure, but it was best if the cure was the last resort.
When it comes to scamming, this is true, too. If you can avoid being in scam-zone in the first place, better to find a way to avoid the situation altogether than have to find a way out.
I took a hard look in the mirror on January 1, 2023, and swallowed the truth like a bitter pill. This was not the first time I had been scammed. I’d been scammed at the workplace, in romantic relationships, over leases, and in matters related to jiu-jitsu-related, among others.
The more I thought about it, the more I’d realized that I’d been scammed a fair bit. More than I’d wanted to admit, and largely out of a desire to believe in the kindness of strangers and trust in some greater, essential human goodness.
Wiping my tears, I started thinking beyond the car scam and toward other circumstances where I had been overtly or subtly scammed over time.
Identifying what they all had in common, I noticed three trends:
I’d been lured into a false sense of urgency in making a decision, usually with financial implications.
My newness or ignorance about a domain had been exploited, usually along with emotions.
I did not have something in writing to fall back on if something went wrong.
Cultivating awareness is a first step toward improvement, right?
I won’t give advice on how to avoid a scam and given my particularly-recent victim status, you probably shouldn’t take any advice I give on that topic. But here’s what I learned or hope to remember for an inevitable next time—because anyone can be fooled by the right person at the right time.
Having situational and personal awareness of when and where you’re vulnerable can reduce your odds of being the easy prey for a scam.
Doing research in advance in domains where scams are common (and where you happen to be information-deficient) can heighten your awareness and make you harder to fool.
After being on your guard, asking questions, and doing your best to be an inconvenient or more difficult target, the best thing you can do is trust your gut.
Closing out, here’s hoping your new year started off to a better start than mine, and here’s to honoring your instincts,
EZ