TRICK OR TREAT?

Someone from AIA called me at work earlier this week to offer me an interview for a management trainee. I turned down the offer of the interview on the suspicion that it was some sort of play to get me to attend some sales push. There were just too many things about the call contents which did not add up.

This reminds of me of a column I read in the Lianhe Zaobao last Sunday. It was about this guy who was contacted by a long lost classmate on Facebook and invited to have dinner with her. So he has all these fantasies about this beautiful lady, whom he recalled as being extremely popular during school days. He goes for the dinner and finds out that she had invited several other people along, all of them other classmates from various stages of her school life. It turned out that she was involved in this multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme and was using Facebook to net these old classmates as potential customers. The dinner was just a sales pitch, and this guy and his fellow dinner mates felt obliged to buy something since she had just given them a dinner treat. Jackpot.

A similar thing happened to me some years ago. A University classmate invited some of us to a class gathering for our University class at her place. When I reached her place, I was shocked to find all sorts of strangers at our class gathering, and only two other ex-classmates. And yes, we had all been tricked into attending a MLM sales pitch. When I talked to these other strangers, I found out that they had all also been invited under various other pretexts.

A neighbour once invited my mother and several other neighbours in our block to her place for a small gathering and movie session, ostensibly for the purpose of getting to know each other better. When my mother got there, it was to find several members of this neighbour’s self group in attendance and the “movie” was actually a religious production. Enough said.

I think it is extremely sad that things have developed to a stage where it becomes difficult to give people the benefit of the doubt. If even friends can ignore the potential damage to friendships by doing such things as I have described above, then what other scruples do strangers and profit oriented companies need to have?