A double-sawbuck isn’t equivalent to $100.00. Look it up.
When I was delivering medicines at night, I used to get hit up in parking lots with this gas money crap at least twice a week. At that time, the favorite story was that his pick up truck was out of gas and he had pushed it onto a vacant lot just a few blocks away and his wife and baby were waiting for him to get back and it was sort of a bad neighborhood and he was really concerned. The only true part of the story was the bad neighborhood thing; we were in bad neighborhoods where this happened most often. I once told one of these guys that he shouldn’t be worried because that vacant lot was filled with out of gas pick up trucks containing wives and children; there should be enough women on hand to defend her if she were to be threatened. I thought for a few moments that I had gone too far but he finally turned away and walked off, muttering curses as he went.
Yes, I assume that’s the reason why so many US dopers talk about all the poor people living on the streets, staying in libraries etc. in US cities, and how there are no other programms to help the homeless.
That the US is not a liberatarian land of “freedom means people are free to die in the gutter (esp. as I might have to pay some taxes for their support otherwise” probably explains why so many dopers are complelty convinced that when anybody receives welfare or other social help or is poor it’s his own fault, because they can work and are … well not rich, but don’t need help. And why so many dopers are against paying for poor people if it means one cent more taxes. Yes, I can see lots of evidence how socially concerned with helping people the US, given the large concern of how health insurance for everybody is socialist and so on.
I once offered to buy a panhandler a meal at the taco stand he accosted me in front of. He accepted; I bought him the biggest burrito and largest drink they had, and watched him start to eat it as I left. He thanked me profusely. It made me feel 1) charitable, and 2) not gullible.
This is a very old scam indeed. My mother and I encountered it in a supermarket parking lot in Bozeman, Montana, of all places, over 20 years ago. This scruffy old guy walks up to us as Mom is loading groceries into the back of the station wagon. He is holding this tiny little gas can. He starts telling Mom his sob story about how he had driven here from (some city in the eastern US, I can’t remember) and he was going to visit his son who lives in Three Forks, MT (about 30 miles from where we were) who he hadn’t seen for mumble mumble years, and he had run out of gas, and all he needs is a few bucks so he can buy the gas to get there. Mom very politely told him that she could not help him, but that she knew there was a pay phone in the supermarket, and perhaps he could call his son collect.
This seemed like a reasonable solution to me, so I was a bit confused when he walked off and started bugging other shoppers in the parking lot instead of heading into the store. That’s when Mom told me that the guy was a scammer, just asking for money. Very unusual at that place and time.
Yes, I much prefer taking a downtown area which has the most potential for producing tax revenue that can be used to actually help people and turning it onto a Disneyland for druggies so that shoppers and tourists stay away, stores and restaurants retreat to the suburbs, and the whole place can turn to shit. Then poor people can sleep there overnight and be robbed and molested by crack heads. Nothing better than walking around downtown and having to avoid the puke, human excrement, and the urine stink just to be accosted every few blocks with one scam after another. Then you can take public transportation and sit next to some smelly, crazy guy who scooped a transfer out of the trash.
I want nothing more than our central cities to be clean and safe. The parks, museums, libraries, and public transportation are there to be enjoyed by all. When I grew up poor I loved to go into Boston because there were so many things that I could do for free. These days central cities have been taken over by crazies, drunks, druggies, and thugs. Helping them live in the street does not help them and it does not help society. A healthy “commons” is vital to social mobility. Sure it feels nice to give a bum some money, but it just hastens the day when every one who can will retreat to the suburbs and drive their SUVs to shop in soul-less malls full of chain stores and restaurants.
Hmmph. Last Sunday, a man knocked on my front door and gave my friend a long story about how he needed $20 to buy a plumbing snake from Home Depot because he’s a plumber in the middle of a job but he hocked his tools because of the bad economy and once he’s paid for the job he’ll have plenty to pay us back and also get his tools back and then he’ll be a self-employed successful businessman and we can get all of our future plumbing needs from him for free. My friend pointed out that it was 11:00 on a Sunday night, and Home Depot was closed.
A half hour later, he knocked again, and gave the same spiel to my boyfriend, who had answered the door this time, without apparently understanding that he had been to this house before.
Because he didn’t give her $100. He gave her $20. A sawbuck is $10; probably because the Roman numeral for ten is X, which looks like a sawhorse. So a double-sawbuck is $XX, or $20.
Why do I take the trouble? Because it’s more interesting that typing $20. I also say ‘fin’ for a fiver, and ‘kilobuck’ for a thousand. And there might be someone who thinks a sawbuck is a 50 instead of a 10, and it provides an opportunity to ‘fight a little ignornance’.
My vote on the great sawbuck debate of '09 is for “trying too hard”. Put down the fedora, unclip the wallet chain, and drink Miller Lite for a week instead of some $9 Belgian job.
There’s a guy who I drive by several times a week at the same corner with a sign that says “Why lie? It’s for beer.” I’m pretty sure that a guy who’s panhandling every single day is buying more than exclusively beer with that money.
A few weeks ago I was getting gas at a station on Cedar Road in Cleveland and a woman approached me and asked for seventeen cents. I was so startled I gave it to her. She may have been running a scam, but if she’s doing it seventeen cents at a time, she’s got my respect. I didn’t watch to see if she went into the station to pay for her gas afterward. I figure hey, anybody could come up a couple of dimes short at the pump (she didn’t tell me why she wanted the money and I didn’t ask for an itemized list).
I have been asked for gas money several times. The story goes they live about 30 miles away and need gas to get home. I ask them why the hell they drove 30 miles away from home without enough gas. I have bought food for people who are asking at a fast food restaurant. Sometimes they are really annoyed when I say" tell me what you want and I will bring it out".
If an alky says he needs a buck for beer money ,I would be more likely to give it to him. I hate the lies.
A similar scam I’ve seen lately is two guys, supposedly father and son, with their old beater in the parking lot with the hood up, the son asking people for money to repair a hose or belt or something. I guess having the car right there with the hood open is supposed to be more convincing.
This is a pretty popular scam in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I get hit up for gas or food money pretty often in various parking lots. If I’m feeling less grouchy than usual, then I’ll offer to buy the gas or food, but so far, I’ve never been taken up on it. One Dallas newspaper columnist will occasionally run an article about the various scammers around town (evidently he visits many parking lots), and in those articles, he’ll give a description of the scammers, the lots they frequent, how many times they’ve hit him or others up, and their stories.
Once I was in a mall bathroom, and I heard a couple of little girls, both under 13, hitting women up for bus fare home. I avoided them and found a security guard that I was friendly with (I worked in the theater at the mall), who was quite interested in them. I herded them out, and he took them away. He later told me that he contacted their parents, and told both the kids and the parents that these kids weren’t allowed back in the mall unless they had bus fare home and/or their parents with them, that if he caught them doing this again that they’d be banned from the mall permanently.
I’ll give you money. not for an outright lie like this though. If you need it for booze, drugs or cigarettes, whatever it is that gets you through this then it’s yours. but don’t bullshit me about it like this
