Confidence tricksters

This is an anecdote that still boils my blood when I think about it. Actually, there are two. One when I got well and truly duped, helped along by my own ego and another when my then partner got sucked into a, ‘nice guy’ act and trusted him enough to hand over cash from the till even after my protestations. It’s a story I’m quite embarrassed to tell, but here goes.

The first time I was ‘confidence tricked’ was during a quiet time of the day at the bar shortly after opening up. This jolly, short little man with dirty hands and dirty overalls came into the restaurant as bold as brass asking for ‘boss man’. This got my goat a bit. There was one member of my team who used to think he ran the place. It always niggled me. This particular guy always referred to it as his bar and would march about like he was the manager. I suppose really I just didn’t like the guy, he rubbed me up the wrong way I felt that he undermined me a lot. I shouldn’t have kept him on so long really but he cleaned the bar like a demon and was excellent at making cocktails, so he stayed.

When this cocky little thing strolls in asking for boss man I instantly assume he is asking for this guy, let’s call him Keith, and he had told him he was the boss. I asked him to describe who he was looking for and he put his hand up high to indicate his height. ‘Boss man, tall guy, works here. He said you had a problem with your toilets’. Well, what restaurant or bar doesn’t have a regular problem with their toilets? I even prompted him to get the colour of Keith’s hair and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s him. He said he was the boss and asked me to come fix your loos.’

‘I’m the boss’, I told him, incredulous, but by now I was so mad with Keith for taking over yet again that I was doing nothing but grumbling to this stranger about how he isn’t the boss and this is my restaurant and oh I went on and on. Anyway, this guy told me he had to go buy some special something or other to pour down the toilets to unblock them once and for all. ‘It’s £27’, he said, ‘if you can spot me that I’ll go now and get it and we can get it sorted’. Still grumbling I went to the till. We didn’t have any £10 notes. Just two £20s, so I gave him that them both and off he went. Within seconds of him leaving the front door I knew just what I had happened. I never saw this scruffy little man or those two twenty quid notes again. And the loos were still blocked.

I couldn’t be angry with anyone but myself. I couldn’t even be mad at Keith because he really had had nothing to do with it. My own egotistical idiocy over who was called the boss got in the way of any shred of common sense I might have had. We were £40 down before even serving a single customer. I’m even getting mad now, writing about it more than 12 years later. Grrrr…

Part two

Would you believe me if I told you it happened again? Yes, you probably would, given previous decisions and behaviour. It wasn’t directly down to me this time but I was there. I could have stopped it. My then partner, let’s call her Sam, was working in the bar on the afternoon shift on a Monday while I did a bit of admin. That’s probably not true and it was more likely I was flapping around worrying and being completely ineffective. When I came into the place at about 2.30 she was happily chatting away to a friendly looking middle-aged, working class sort of man drinking beer at the bar. We didn’t get many blokes like him in Ah Bar, largely because a bottle of beer was £3.50 and you could get a whole pint for a pound less 10 metres away at a proper pub. He seemed like a lovely man and Sam was laughing away at his jokes, the two were getting on great guns.

I went out, flapped around a bit more and came back an hour later and he was still there. He kept knocking back the beers and Sam kept throwing back her head laughing. He was a real comedian, this one. Then his phone rang. He looked at it, said he had to take this call as it was his daughter and he went outside to chat to her. He came back in and his face had changed. He looked worried. ‘It’s my daughter’, he said, ‘she borrowed my car and it’s about to get towed because she parked on double yellows’. He looked a bit distressed. He kept saying his wife would go mad with him and his daughter, as he wasn’t supposed to lend her the car. He went on and on. He looked at Sam and said straight, ‘If I can get £45 to her she can pay the fine and they won’t tow the car away. I’ve only got a tenner on me, could you lend me it and I will bring it right back? She’s only down the road’.

I felt a bit sick hearing this with the ‘overall boss man’ incident still fresh in my mind. I said no. Trying to be as friendly as I could, I said, ‘no, I’m sorry, we can’t lend any customers money’. He pleaded towards Sam, seeing that she was the softer one. I told Sam that if he doesn’t come back she has to pay the money back into the till. We were partners. This wasn’t just a working relationship, so I didn’t feel like I could pull rank, although strictly speaking I could have done. It was my name above the door and all that. I didn’t want to cause a scene and just kept repeating myself quietly, which was very unlike me.

She was convinced this bloke was the real deal, a straight up geezer that she wanted to help. You’d think they were related, so good was his technique, and she went to the till and got him £35. He thanked her and explained that he would be back in half an hour at the most and not to worry, we can trust him. Do you think we ever saw him again? Of course we bloody didn’t. Not even after a frantic search of the local pubs to see if he had gone to spend his earnings nearby, probably with the bloke in the overalls from last time. Goodness knows what we would have done if we’d found him. The only consolation I had was that the amount of beers he paid for almost covered the money he took, meaning we broke even, but that’s not really how a business works is it?

What not to do notes:

·       Never lend money out to people you don’t know

·       Don’t let your ego get in the way

·       Ask for a business card or form of ID if you feel unsure

·       Always use credible businesses preferably recommended for work on site

·       Just don’t bloody fall for it like we did. TWICE!