I got a strange phone call recently.
The number was blocked. The caller claimed to be a detective in Rhode Island. He asked me about my father and said that a car registered to him had been involved in an accident.
My father died two years ago.
And, by pure coincidence, my brother and his family happened to be vacationing in Rhode Island at the time.
That was enough.
My nervous system got there before my rational mind did.
The caller started asking questions. Where was I physically located? Was my business in New York? Did I have insurance information?
Looking back, it was obvious what was happening.
He was fishing.
But in the moment, I wasn’t calmly analyzing the structure of the conversation. I was reacting to the possibility that something terrible had happened to someone I loved.
Fight or flight is a remarkable thing. And, it’s an evil genius move to tap into the fight or flight of someone else in order to extract valuable information.
It exists for a reason. If a tiger is running toward you, you probably don’t want to spend several minutes carefully evaluating competing hypotheses. Your body is designed to react first.
The problem is that modern predators understand this too.
Scammers, manipulators, aggressive negotiators, and dishonest people all benefit from the same basic phenomenon: an emotionally dysregulated person is easier to influence.
Create fear.
Create urgency.
Create confusion.
Then ask questions.
The genius of the tactic is that the victim often supplies the information necessary to make the story more convincing.
“Is your brother in Rhode Island?”
“No, but actually my brother is there right now.”
“The car is registered to your dad”
“That’s not possible my dad died two years ago”
And suddenly the caller knows something he didn’t know thirty seconds earlier.
That was the lesson for me.
I initially regretted how strongly I reacted. I thought I should have been calmer, more skeptical, more controlled.
But regret isn’t particularly useful unless it becomes instruction.
The better question is: What do I do differently next time?
For me, the answer is simple.
When someone gives me alarming information and immediately begins asking questions, I don’t have to participate in the emotional tempo they have created.
I can slow the conversation down.
I can say:
Who are you?
What agency are you with?
What is your badge number?
What is the incident number?
I’ll call the agency directly.
And then I can hang up.
A legitimate person will survive verification.
A scam depends upon preventing it.
That distinction applies far beyond suspicious phone calls.
People sometimes create urgency because urgency benefits them.
They demand immediate answers.
They manufacture crises.
They insist that something must be decided right now.
They provoke anger and then try to negotiate with the angry version of you.
They frighten you and then ask the frightened version of you for information.
One of the most useful disciplines I’ve been learning is that I don’t have to make important decisions from inside the emotion someone else created.
Fear can be information.
Anger can be information.
Anxiety can be information.
But none of them necessarily need to be the person driving the car.
Sometimes the strongest response is simply:
I need a minute.
Let me verify that.
I’ll get back to you.
Those sentences create something extremely valuable: space between stimulus and response.
And in that space, judgment returns.
I still don’t love that I got rattled by the call. But maybe that’s not the lesson.
Maybe the lesson is that being rattled is human. Getting back up, pulling it together, staying focused is the resilience. It’s where the work happens.
Growth isn’t becoming a person who never experiences fear.
Growth is recognizing fear quickly enough that you don’t hand it the microphone.
The next strange call won’t effect me in the same way, because that’s not who I am. I’m a fighter. I learn from my hits. I get back up again. Every single time.
