Nirvana for one cent

My sister calls me on the phone. She is mad as hell at my father and wants me to talk to him. What about? I inquire, and my sister starts fuming like a rocket out of control. It turns out that after all our lectures to my father and after all the warnings and the cautious spying on him, he has again responded to a piece of mail addressed to him telling him he has won a fabulous prize for nothing . Once again, he has sent back his jovial acceptance of the terms to receive the great gift. The last time he did this, my sister and I ended up spending hours on the phone with his credit card company billing him $39.95 a month, the collection company harassing him for non-payment for the gift he had purchased, and a company in Florida who had started the whole ordeal.

What is with us Iranians that as soon as we enter this land, we forget all elements of common sense and cautious living. Back in Iran, the nicest stranger pitching the most benign product would have been eyed very suspiciously, maybe even as a part of foreign conspiracy. I remember as a kid, my mother threw away any free item that she received because she was certain it contained some kind of poisonous element inside. The government lottery was viewed as the biggest scam in Iran, and the response to any offer for anything free was a definite pooz-khand.

Here, in America, a bozo on the phone or on TV hawking the most bizarre product with no use ever in our household would be looked upon as God, and all his words would be accepted as reverent. All this because the hawker has a seductive voice on the phone, or is charmingly arresting in blond hair and blue eyes as he appears on the TV screen providing testimony after testimony for the product he sells.

In the first instance of this menace, my father was completely seduced by a product that claimed to cause any, I mean any, stain vanish: ink from fabric, sauce from garments, stains from carpets, etc. My father, so bewildered by the amazing “technological breakthrough,” ordered a whole carton of the stuff and vowed that this product, back in Iran, would make him a fortune. Once he received the magic potion, just to make his point even more dramatically, he insisted to splatter ink on my mother's favorite white blouse and then make the ink vanish. Needless to say, my mother still has not forgiven him for the stain that never came off. She mentions it in front of every guest passing through their house.

The second try was with a video offer. “Buy two videos for one cent each, and nothing ever again, unless you want to and then for $19.95 a month.” Well, my father sent back the postcard stating that he was buying two videos for two cents and waited to be asked if he wanted any more. The question never arrived. Instead every two weeks he received a different movie with academy award winning titles such as “Deadly Drop Zone,” “Iron Eagle 5,” and my favorite, “Steel Over Baghdad.” For each of these sorry excuses of a movie, he was charged $19.95. All that these tapes were good for was to record Persian TV on them. By the time we stopped the bleeding of money into this scam, almost $500 was lost.

I ask my sister to calm down. This is partly her fault. She is the one responsible for collecting the mail and throwing away anything that remotely resembles a sweepstake or a prize offer. She apologizes, but reminds me we have to stop this before it's too late. Remember the last scam? The free cruise that had turned out to be a $900 winter trip in something not bigger than a coffin to Alaska, of all places. I ask her to call the credit card company and cancel the card that was asked for as part of the conditions for receiving the free prize. We'll then wait for a phone call that will come when the scammers realize the card doesn't work. We'll take it from there.

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