Taking
a fairly broad approach to what constitutes an insult...

Couple of weeks back I was crossing the road to the tube near me when I was stopped by a woman who asked if I was English. No, I said, I'm Irish, will that do? She launched into a spiel about how she was desperate, she wasn't given to approaching people in the street yadda yadda. As it happens, I've been doing quite a bit of research into con artists recently, and recognised a script when I heard it; she was about to (a) portray herself as a respectable woman who had been desperately wronged and now needed cash and (b) try to rip me off for as much money as I was good for.

Sure enough, she started telling me about how she'd come back to her St John's Wood home to find her husband in bed with another woman, and had run out of the house without her cards or money, and needed money to get to her brother's house near Guildford. She'd give me her mobile number, address and so on and I could get the money back from her in a week or so. Obviously.

Not long before, I'd had my Switch card cloned, and 600 quid ripped off from my account. So, I explained this to her and apologised that I wasn't in any position to help her with cash. But, I went on, I did have some friends nearby in Kilburn. Some quite unpleasant and, truth be told, fucking dangerous friends, who owed me a couple of very big favours. And if she'd be willing to pass on the address, I could have three or four of them round there inside an hour with a white van and they would make her problem go away. And then we could talk about... payment.

She RAN.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Fri 30 Apr 2004, 14:32, Reply)