Have I ever told you about a movie I saw on tv when I was 6? It ended with a boy riding a wild horse away from the evil villagers and swimming off to a land where boys and horses could live together forever. My dear sister looked at my smiling face, understood immediately what I was thinking and poured a cold dose of reality over my head: “it means they drowned.”
Dad came home an hour later to find his youngest daughter a red-eyed, snot crusted mess gagging out ‘they drowned…..they….hecchhhh, they….drowwwwwnnnnddddd….hechhh, hecchhhh,’
I was quite gullible as a child. The kind of gullible that spends a night being violently ill because my sister said, “here, try this…” and I did. Some weird bean thing she’d found in the garden, or so she told me. 
There seems to be a theme here. I can’t actually blame her: after all I was 6 years younger, a not very bright little bumble-pup who wrecked the sweet deal she’d had up until my appearance. She was a smart ass young teenager when I was still learning to colour inside the lines. So the only entertainment I offered was in the category of “and she ate it” stories to tell her friends.
When I grew up I was much less gullible and would never deliberately feed something questionable to a friend. Except for that skate stir fry but there was no malicious intent. After all, I ate it too. Which my dearest seems to overlook whenever he 
comments on that failed attempt to poison him.
Now times are changing and so is my brain. Again. Some words, names, nouns, lines of logic and basic math fail to leap into the viewing frame on demand. I realize basic math never was easy for me but I could do it with little more than a moment of concentration. Now I reach for paper or the calculator app on my smart phone. In my defence I can say I do know there is an app for that, I’m not so old that I’m beyond that level of comprehension.
It isn’t advancing technology, however, that is causing all this. It is age, pure and simple. I can keep the ‘little grey cells’, as Mr. Poirot says, active but that doesn’t mean they respond as quickly as I would like. It’s more like they take a message and will get back to me in a while. Like when I’m falling asleep. Or can’t write it down and forget it again. 
The most interesting aspect of this for me, however, is I’m beginning to understand how older people get scammed. Seriously. It isn’t a matter of a generation that trusted people more or grew up in another time. It’s because we are still used to making decisions and judgements in short order but the back up information we use to think things through takes longer to retrieve from our wee mental archives.
Maybe it’s because we have so much more information to wade through on any given subject. Or maybe it’s just harder to remember something we don’t do on a regular basis. The result is we become gullible again. When I was 6 it was because I didn’t know what a castor bean was or why my sister would want to return to her status as only child.
Fifty years later, it’s because I’m still operating with last year’s information but the scammers are already onto a whole new version of sounding trustworthy.
My hearing isn’t quite as good as it used to be. My thinking isn’t quite as fast. There was a message on the phone from my bank saying there is a problem with one of my credit cards and call this number. It almost 
sounded right. If my hearing was a little worse I might not have twigged to the same robo-voice that was so excited about an all expenses paid trip to Chernobyl I’d just won.
There was even a Facebook Page for the bank and it said that was a real bank number. But it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t say why and I couldn’t, at that moment, say why not.
So I walked to the bank for a bit of exercise. I talked to the nice young man at the front desk and he basically patted me on the head, said the only number to call about a credit card is the one on the back of the credit card. And the bank does not have a Facebook page.
So. Here’s the bottom line, if you’re not sure: don’t. If it’s someone says they’re calling because your grandchild, your niece or your nephew needs help but you don’t recognize the voice: don’t.
If anyone tries to make you feel guilty, afraid, concerned or otherwise pressured to react before you can think it through carefully: really really really DON”T.
And, as I learned just the other day, if a recording concludes with “This is not a Telemarketing Scam”, you can be sure that it is.