@VincentMalamute said in Knocking at doors:
People will make up anything to try to gain advantage in a negotiation!
That's it exactly.
A few months ago someone in a nice late model Suburban pulled up as I worked in the front yard and started in with a story about how he needed money for gas {gestures to suitably pitiful gas gauge} and offered to sell me a ring, which he took off his hand and pressed into mine. Perhaps $20? The sad moppet in the passenger seat looked sad and moppy.
There was hand clasping and there were sob stories. God's blessing were conferred just in case. It's all calculated to play on sympathy, and uses some of the same techniques of a bus station cult recruiter.
I had a five and gave it to him and placed the ring on his dashboard and emitted my highest wattage phony smile as I wished him the best and backed off.
Even though he got a fiver for nothing, it's a safe bet that he left disappointed. His goal, I would imagine, was to hook me in emotionally and convince me that the ring was gold and a family heirloom* and it broke his heart to have to sell it but he needed money to feed Miss Moppet as well as to gas up the truck... The target would be as high as he could get me to climb the ladder — I gather that the going rate these days might be a couple hundred for such a solid gold item passed down by his father and his father before him. But I didn't have enough idle curiosity to stay with him just to see how it all played out.
*Definitely not a solid brass ring of the sort that street toughs buy at the flea market as a sort of legal brass knuckles, and for sure he didn't have a shoeboxful in back as the stock and trade of an old-school con because how could I even think such a thing.